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THE TECHNIQUE 

<& OF REST e*> 



BY 

ANNA C. BRACKETT 



As for Leisure 

" The fashion of it men forgot 
About the age of chivalry"' 




NEW YORK 
HARPER AND BROTHERS 
MDCCCXCIII 



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Copyright, 1892, by Harper & Brothers. 



All rights reserved. 



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PO Dept. 



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"My roof is hardly picturesque — 
// lacks the pleasant reddish brown 
Of the tiled house-tops out of town. 
And cannot even hope to match 
The modest beauty of the thatch ; 
Nor is it Gothic or grotesque — 
No gable breaks, with quaint design. 
Its hard monotony of line, 
And not a gargoyle on the spout 
Brings any latent beauty out; 
Its only charm — / hold it high — 
Is just its nearness to the sky?' 



CONTENTS. 

CHAP. PAGE 

I. REST ...... . . . . I 

II. NECESSITY .... a ... 34 

III. FREEDOM . . 88 

IV. RESTLESSNESS ...... 119 

V. BLUE-ROSE MELANCHOLY . .154 



r ma 
i 

THE 

TECHNIQUE OF REST 




REST 

jHE occasion of this book is 
an article of mine in Har- 
per's New Monthly Mag- 
azine for June, 1 89 1, called 
"The Technique of Rest," 
which was an attempt to help, out of my 
own rather wide experience, some of the 
women who were tired. From differ- 
ent parts of the country, and from wom- 
en whom I had never heard of, came 
letters of thanks for the help given to 



2 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST 

them — letters written evidently out of 
very full and very weary lives. Then 
it was suggested to me that more might 
be said on the same subject, for which 
there seemed to be a decided demand. 
Thanks and appreciation were univer- 
sal from the women who spoke of the 
article ; it seemed to have touched the 
right chord, and for that I was very 
thankful, since the world of women is 
not destitute of effort, nor is its effort 
purposeless, but the purpose is too often 
methodless, and so, much brave effort 
is worse than wasted. This is particu- 
larly the case in home life, the de- 
mands of which must of necessity be 
multifarious and never-ending. Where 
woman has taken her place in business 
she has found her method ready-shaped 
for her, and following that, she does 
her work, if with a certain amount of 
monotony, yet without undue fatigue. 
Her hours are fixed, and as a rule she 



REST 3 

gets needful change of scene as she 
goes to her business and returns to her 
home or the place where she lives. 
But the " home- maker " has not, nor 
can she have, any such change, and 
her hours are always from the rising of 
the sun beyond the going down of the 
same. She cannot get away from the 
demands made upon her, and as the 
years go on, these tighten more and 
more. She may try to escape them, 
but they are more in number than the 
sands of the sea, and disappear for a 
moment only to return in other and 
more complicated forms. The more 
humble and the more in earnest she 
grows, the more weary she gets, till she 
lives in a perpetual sense of not being 
able to draw one full breath. Many a 
woman will recognize the truth of these 
words, though it will seem to most men 
that they are exaggerated. I said above 
that from women I had received only 



4 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST 

warm thanks and appreciation for my 
words in the " Technique of Rest." I 
should add that I sent it to a man — a 
psychologist — who said in return: "I 
have read your article ; it is good, but 
too grim." That was not what the 
women thought ; they knew it was not 
too grim for the truth. 

It is sometimes asked why things in 
the home cannot be regulated in the 
same way as they are in business. It 
can be done to a certain but very lim- 
ited extent, for to do more would de- 
stroy the very idea of a home. Times 
for meals can be maintained if the man 
of the family does not make that im- 
possible. Beyond this regularity there 
must be a large degree of flexibility 
Peace and rest are the characteristics 
of the home. But it should not be a 
peace which is only a stifled war, and 
the Rest must come from the constant 
balance of the complicated conditions, 



REST 5 

yielding at every side with a certain 
compensating movement, so that it 
shall yet be firm and supporting. That 
this is impossible is no reason why it 
should not be accomplished. One is 
reminded of Montaigne's saying that 
only when a thing becomes incredible 
is there any room for faith. A woman 
has power to accomplish the impossi- 
ble, and she should never fear to un- 
dertake it. Just that she may do this 
is she made so quick and so facile, so 
able to turn from one thing to another, 
and so sensitive to outside impressions. 
Give her the width of information which 
she lacks because of the narrowness of 
her education, and she will free herself 
from the coils which render her breath- 
ing difficult, and find herself able to 
create a home without, in doing it, 
sacrificing herself. But in order to 
ao this, she must work from within, 
outward j she must create within her- 



6 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST 

self the strength which shall be equal 
to that pressing upon her from without. 
For it is only in a balance of forces 
that Rest consists. It is not anything 
in and for itself ; it is only the harmony 
of demand and supply, the supply vary- 
ing as the demand varies, no matter 
how often or how greatly, with the 
beautiful sureness of some of the sew- 
ing machines. 

What Ave want is an automatic ten- 
sion attachment to every woman. Then 
the work will run easily, and the stitches 
will be of even length, even though the 
pull be now strong and now weak. Rest 
is not rust. It may at some times mean 
the absolute do-nothingness longed for 
by the old woman whose pathetic last 
words I have never been able to divest , 
my memory of since I first read them, 
centuries ago. I am quite sure these 
lines must have been written by a wom- 
an, though their authorship has never 



REST 7 

yet been claimed to my knowledge. 
What makes them pathetic is their un- 
mistakable truth. I give the epitaph : 

" Here lies a poor woman who always was tired, 
For she lived in a house where help was not hired, 
Her very last words were, ' My friends, I am going 
To a place where there's nothing of washing or sewing ! 
Oh, everything there will be just to my wishes, 
For where they don't eat, there's no washing of dishes. 
The courts with sweet anthems are constantly ringing, 
But having no voice, I shall get clear of singing!" 
She folded her hands with her latest endeavor, 
And whispered,' Oh, nothing, sweet nothing forever ! ' " 

In the whole range of literature, I do 
not think there is anything which can 
match the eighth line for completeness 
and finish of thought. _ It is evident 
that the question of the music had for 
a time troubled her, but that the mo- 
ment had come in which that anxiety 
also had been dispelled, and she was 
ready to fold her hands — another stroke 
of genius — in perfect confidence that 
at last there was no more doubt as to 
the complete rest awaiting her. It is 



8 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST 

doubtless true that Nirvana offers great 
attractions to many women, and that 
the preacher who would strive to lead 
them by picturing heaven as a place of 
continual activity is misdirecting his 
efforts. 

In the same strain was the recent ac- 
count of the suicide of a woman found 
dead at eighty years old, in the house 
of her grandson, where she was living. 
Under her pillow there was a half-emp- 
tied bottle of laudanum and a piece of 
paper on which she had written, " This 
will be the last time of my going to 
bed/' One can easily imagine the feel- 
ing of rest at last with which the poor 
old woman wrote these words — a pro- 
test against the deadly monotony of 
daily existence, against the continual 
drudgery of dressing and undressing, 
which necessarily forms so large a part 
of the duties of every day, and which, 
whenever we become conscious of it, is 



REST 9 

so wearily tiresome. Sometimes there 
is no other rest but absolute do-noth- 
ing, and therefore has a pitiful God 
made death a component part of every 
life, a something without which life 
would be incomplete. But this does 
not invalidate the statement made 
above, that Rest is in any case only 
harmony between the inside and the 
outside conditions of life. If these 
conditions be not harmonious, then one 
of them must be tuned up or down to 
the other. And this tuning cannot be 
done once for all, but must be a con- 
tinual care. Every day brings its own 
conditions and new complications. The 
orchestra cannot tune its instruments 
to last through even one concert. Al- 
ways there must be new adjustments 
after every piece of music, and so it is 
with human life. That human nature 
is always wanting to embody its experi- 
ence, whether religious or political, in 



10 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST 

creeds and in laws is only a proof of 
how it longs for rest ; and the fact of 
revision of creeds and laws shows also 
that this effort is of no use except as 
leading to a new activity. As Professor 
James has so well said, the mere nam- 
ing of anything gives us a certain sense 
of rest and repose. It is as if we fast- 
ened the new idea with a label, and 
now might reasonably hope that it 
would cease tormenting us with its per- 
sistent presence, and leave us free to 
attend to other things. When Adam 
had named all the animals, he must 
have gone to sleep for the first time 
with a quiet hope of undisturbed re- 
pose. It is very simple to name a 
thing. To formulate a creed — that is, 
to name a conviction on the profound- 
est subject of thought — is a more diffi- 
cult task, but really in the very same 
line. To the questions which have 
concerned us, we give a formal answer : 



REST II 

We say, " I am tired of being continu- 
ally haunted by you. I believe exactly 
so and so and once for all. Now let 
me rest." And the Church does rest, 
but only for a while. Or the State says, 
"Let us decide forever, and in a way 
that no one can misunderstand, the 
question of what shall be considered 
crimes, and what punishments shall 
be allotted to the doers of these of- 
fences. We will settle all the problems 
of property so that any questions which 
can possibly arise shall be easily ad- 
justed." And so it does, or tries to do. 
But a live world, whether of thought or 
of action, cannot be kept in such swad- 
dling-clothes, so that the history of the 
world is only a story of perpetual re- 
vision in one region or another. When 
nations have fought till they are tired, 
they call for rest in the form of a trea- 
ty, and they hope that now, at last, 
there will be a final settlement of the 



12 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST 

vexed questions. We are always hear- 
ing about " final settlements/' and it 
takes us a considerable part of our lives 
to comprehend that there is no such 
thing as a final settlement of anything, 
and that we need not look for it. Wheth- 
er in large or in small affairs, there 
must be perpetual readjustment. All 
the monotony there really is, is a mo- 
notony of change, and this is no more 
so in household affairs than in all oth- 
ers. Therefore, women ought not to 
complain of monotony in their lives, as 
tf it were something especially belong- 
ing to them. It is the law of any live 
universe. Neither ought they to ex- 
pect that they can escape the need of 
constant tuning. 

Where the harmony between the in- 
ner desire and the outside circumstances 
does not exist — in other words, where 
there is no rest — the question to be set- 
tled is, first of all, which of the two is to 



REST 13 

be changed. Five from ten does not 
leave eight, but we can get eight by 
changing five to two just as easily as 
by substituting thirteen for ten. There 
are always at least two ways of doing a 
thing, and there are generally more than 
two. The thoughtless person goes blind- 
ly to work, changing the first condition 
that presents itself to his view, though 
the fact that it does so present itself 
may be a mere accident. But what 
we need is the breadth of mind which 
brings all the conditions before it, the 
clearness of sight which discriminates, 
weighs, and measures, and this with al- 
ways present thought of the end to be 
attained or to be approached ; and last, 
but not least, the cool self-control which 
poises untroubled with balanced wing 
over all the conditions, suspending ac- 
tion till a rational decision has been 
reached. Even the hawk does not de- 
scend over the lake where the ducks 



14 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST 

are swimming without doing all these 
things. To those who see what they 
imply, it will be clear why the manner 
of the education of the little girl who is 
to be confronted by all the complicated 
and ever -changing problems of home- 
creation is of far more consequence than 
what she is learning. 

Rest you cannot compass till you 
have secured harmony of the internal 
and external conditions of your own 
life, whatever that life may be. The 
question is always which of these con- 
ditions you can change. It may be pos- 
sible, of course, that both are capable 
of modification. If so, the problem be- 
comes more complicated. If, however, 
you decide, after a careful review of all 
the outside circumstances, that they 
cannot be altered, then your task is to 
mould your own mind into harmony 
with those conditions. Every effort to 
do this will be an approximation tow- 



REST 15 

aids Rest. But bear always in mind 
that this must be a perpetually active 
process, and keep your mind ever 
open to the appreciation of the changes 
of the outward world. Harmony is not 
a simple thing. If the bass changes, 
perhaps the soprano must also change, 
and perhaps, also, the contralto and the 
tenor. You are not dealing with dead 
matter, if there be indeed any such thing 
as dead matter in the universe of God. 
You are dealing with His live world on 
the one hand, and on the other with 
your own live soul, and the possibilities 
of combination are practically infinite. 
Therein lies the interest of the problem. 
And if you can bring yourself to look 
at it as a problem, a game which you 
have to play out and to be triumphant 
in, so much the better. There will then 
enter into it a certain keen intellectual 
zest which will be of great service. The 
less personal feeling and the more cool 



16 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST 

intellect you can throw into the game the 
better. If you could stand far enough 
off from the question which you have 
to solve, it would all become perfectly 
clear to you. If you could stand far 
enough off either in space or in time, it 
would be comparatively easy. You do 
not suppose that God has any difficulty 
in seeing clear through all the problems 
of His Providence, or that to Him any 
one event, no matter how small and in- 
significant in your eyes, can be troubled 
or interfered with by any other, no mat- 
ter how great. It is true you have not 
His infinite sight, but you can get far- 
ther away than you are from the press- 
ing problems of to-day and here, if you 
will make a determined effort. And the 
farther away you can get, the more they 
will fall into harmony. It is because the 
conditions lie so close before your eyes 
that you cannot see to disentangle them. 
Try in the freedom of your mind to 



REST 17 

withdraw from them by never so little 
a space, and the crossing and tangled 
lines will begin to weave into some 
kind of order. Necessity — that is, God 
and His world, the whole of it — stands 
outside of you. Within you, you have 
the freedom which God has given. It 
is your business to reconcile that neces- 
sity and that freedom, since it is only 
in such reconciliation that Rest can be 
found. Find it ! It can be found thus, 
no matter how seemingly mean or how 
so-called monotonous is the round of 
your daily life. It is for every woman in 
her own life to lay out her own course 
to the desired haven, and, as a rule, she 
will find it easier to steer her own ship 
than to try to steer the heavenly bodies 
or change the currents of the ocean. 

If your weariness is simply bodily ex- 
haustion, then you need, for restoration, 
only bodily repose. But this is almost 
never the case with a grown - up worn- 
2 



18 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST 

an. Generally with her, the exhaustion 
comes from the mind. With children 
it is different. A child who is properly 
looked after, goes to sleep when it is 
tired, and wakes up refreshed and as 
good as new, for sleep is an unfailing 
restorative for mere bodily weariness, 
and in that case is sure to come to the 
rescue. Indeed, so long as you sleep well 
and eat well, you have no great reason 
to complain ; but in the weariness aris- 
ing from the mind, sleep is not so ready 
to come. The child may reach this 
trouble in the same way. The sensitive, 
conscientious child may be driven to it 
by being forced into introspection — a 
state which is not natural to the imma- 
ture mind — or it may come to the child 
intellectually through bad teaching in 
school. Anything which produces want 
of harmony in the mind will bring nerv- 
ous exhaustion in a greater or a less 
degree. When the conscience has been 



REST 19 

freed, or when the difficulty has been 
solved, the face will brighten and the 
look of care disappear. 

Over and over again, Rest consists 
simply in producing harmony between 
the individual and her surroundings or 
the conditions under which she has to 
live. This harmony must be created by 
herself, for when God created us in His 
own image He could not do otherwise 
than to make us active agents, and to or- 
dain that if we wanted anything, we must 
get it for ourselves. You cannot teach/ 
the child by forcing facts upon him; sol 
long as you do this, they remain foreign \ 
to him. It is only the knowledge that 
he himself actively takes in and assim- 
ilates till it becomes a part of his being 
that goes towards his education. He 
himself must reach out actively for it 
or it can never become his. It is so 
with Rest. It cannot be pasted on to 
us nor forced down into our minds or 



20 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST 

hearts. We must reach out and take it. 
In the case of affliction or trouble, where 
rest will not come till real resignation 
comes, we might at first think that it 
could be passively obtained, but this is 
so far from being the case that no great- 
er effort could be required of us than 
to- put our minds into the passive state 
requisite for being worked upon. Did 
you ever try to hear the sound of the 
crickets in the summer twilight and find 
yourself unable to do so, simply because 
your ear was tuned to the rustle of the 
poplar leaves or to the twitter of the 
birds ? In such case a strong and vig- 
orous effort is required to tune down 
the ear to the chirping, and only then 
is it borne in upon you, though you 
were surrounded by it all the time. Just 
so there is always plenty of Rest lying 
all round you, eager to press in and take 
possession of you, but you must take 
and control the other things with a 



REST 21 

steady and sometimes with a forceful 
hand before it can reach you. This is 
true. Believe it, if you do not know it, 
for the belief that it is so will be one 
great step towards the knowledge of it. 

"'Oh, where is the sea?' the fishes cried, 
As they swam the crystal clearness through ; 

1 We've heard from of old of the ocean's tide, 
And we long to look at the waters blue. 

The wise ones speak of the infinite sea ; 

Oh, who can tell us if such there be ?' 

The lark flew up in the morning bright, 
And sung and balanced on sunny wings ; 

And this was its song : * I see the light, 
I look o'er a world of beautiful things ; 

But flying and singing everywhere, 

In vain I have searched to find the air.'" 

This is too often the case. Before 
" Thy will be done/' came the sorrow 
and the heaviness, and so they come 
still in America as well as in Palestine. 
Resignation is not merely a passive 
state. It is an intensely active one in 



22 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST 

which the soul is standing on tiptoe 
"with arms out -stretched and eager 
face ablaze." If conditions cannot be 
changed, then they must be submitted 
to, but not after the manner of the Ma- 
hometan sailor who drops upon the 
deck when the wind rises, refusing to 
try to handle the ship because Allah 
will save him in any case if it be His 
will, and he will be destroyed in spite of 
all his efforts if Allah has so ordained 
it. We are not Orientals, and Allah is 
not the name of our God. The freedom 
the Orient has never known and can 
never know is ours, but only for a great 
price, and that price, our own effort. 
Our place is not with the sailors who. 
when the ship took fire, "leaped and 
left her," but with those who " stood by 
her, firing steady," as Helen Gray Cone 
says, and it was only for them that the 
old sailor in the tale invoked rest. You 
must have trust in Someone else than 



REST 23 

yourself, and in a wiser Sight than your 
own. If you have not this trust, you 
must fight for it till you win it. Some- 
times the people who claim to love God 
most, trust Him least. They seem un- 
willing to leave anything to Him, as if 
He were incompetent. They insist upon 
trying to do the work of His world- 
currents as if these were of no avail, 
and when great events happen they as- 
sume to stand as His interpreters, or 
they talk of " mysteries " as if they ex- 
pected to fathom His counsels ! They 
make the mistake of trying to compre- 
hend the Infinite. Although presumably 
they have read the book of Job, they 
talk as if in the kingdom of God we 
were in a market-place, where articles 
were laid out openly for sale, and where 
we could buy anything, if only we were 
willing to pay what we consider its fair 
price in any coin which might happen 
to be most convenient for us, unmind- 



24 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST 

ful of the coinage of the kingdom. We 
must not expect to buy with Caesar's 
coins any other than the goods of Cae- 
sar. In the first place, we must hold to 
Montaigne's teaching — that it is only 
when we meet an incredible thing that 
there is any occasion at all for faith. 
In the second place, we must know that 
it is with the heart and never with the 
intellect "that man believeth unto right- 
eousness," and that it is the pure in 
heart, and not the keen in intellect, who 
shall see God. " Mere intellectual rea- 
soning will never lead to the knowledge 
of divine things ;" and we must try 
to see that " demonstrative evidence 
which left no room for doubt would be 
absolutely fatal to any morality, because 
it would leave no place for faith or de- 
liberate choice." It is from a critique 
in the London Spectator on the poems 
of Robert Browning that I am quoting, 
where the writer says that Browning 



REST 25 

knew, and insisted upon it, that " purity 
of heart and loyal love were the only 
sure avenues to the knowledge of God 
and His ways." " Eternal failure is the 
only condition of spiritual progress." 
We must, first of all, understand the 
principle of the spiritual harvest, and 
cease to expect to reap money or fine 
clothes from good deeds. This, to be- 
gin with, will free us from much unrest. 
Those who by daily living have in 
some degree attained this insight have 
no reason to be troubled over any failure 
in memory which advancing age may 
bring. Emily Dickinson wisely asks, 
"Is it oblivion or absorption when things 
pass from our minds ?" We take out 
our watch to look at the time in order 
to decide whether we will follow some 
course of action. We decide, and put 
the watch back again, and are perhaps 
troubled afterwards to find that we can- 
not remember what the time was. But 



26 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST 

that was not what we wanted to know- 
what we did want to know was whether 
we should or should not do a certain 
thing. The knowledge of the exact 
hour was only a means to an end ; we 
ought to be glad that we do not remem- 
ber it. Of what avail would it be to be 
able to recite, never so perfectly, the 
bills of fare of the meals which have 
nourished us ? We don't want to re- 
member such things ; we want to have 
forgotten them. This is the case with 
much of our knowledge also; we do 
not want to hold it in our minds. We 
want to have read a certain book, but 
we do not need to remember the con- 
tents of the book. It is the results 
which we have garnered that are of 
consequence to us, not the steps by 
which we attained them. It is what 
we are, not what we have done, or what 
any one else has done, that concerns us. 
If our lives have been worth anything, 



REST 27 

they have given us some degree of in- 
sight, which is only a sort of mental in- 
stinct telling us at once what to do 
under certain conditions, just as we in- 
voluntarily close our eyes if a blow be 
aimed at our faces, or throw out our 
arms if we slip on the ice. There is a 
theory, not at all improbable, that what 
is known as instinct in the race is only 
the gathered and assimilated wisdom 
of all our ancestors. In the same way, 
the insight which comes with advanc- 
ing age, and which makes the advice of 
its possessors valuable, is only the grad- 
ually assimilated wisdom gained from 
long years in which we have been forced 
to reason out many problems, and to 
contemplate with more or less satisfac. 
tion the results of innumerable deeds, 
whether our own or those of others. 
The remembrance of those deeds, these 
courses of action and their results, have 
been generalized in the mind, till now, 



28 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST 

when we are asked a question on any 
subject with which we are familiar, 
we see at once without conscious rea- 
soning the way of action which it would 
be probably best to adopt. People say 
sometimes after asking for advice, "But 
you do not think about the thing at all ! 
I wanted to talk it over with you," not 
realizing that we have been doing noth- 
ing else but thinking about that very 
thing and a host of others of the same 
nature all our lives, till we have only to 
propose the question to the mind thus 
trained, and the answer starts out like 
the answer to a puzzle, or the result of 
an arithmetical example in a calculating 
machine. It seems possible that the 
gathered and assorted experiences of our 
lives here are to become the instincts 
of our life hereafter — the instincts with 
/which we shall start on that new life. 
^It may well be that we shall no long- 
er remember any of the events or re- 



REST 



29 



flections which led to the formation 
of those instincts, or shall only at times 
dimly recall them as half-remembered 
visions of some uncertain life beyond 
our ken, retaining as material for our 
new experiences only their results in 
consciousness. Towards such a pur- 
pose the weakening, as it is called, 
of mere memory as years go on seems 
to point or dimly to hint. It certainly 
is a method of action not inconsistent 
with what we see and know of that God 
before whom not one sparrow falls to 
the ground unnoticed, and who in Nat- 
ure is always teaching us the lesson of 
how material worn out in one sort of 
service is the fittest to employ in carry- 
ing out a different and a higher pur- 
pose. If there be one lesson more than 
another taught by all study of natural 
phenomena, it is that of this sort of 
economy. There is no niggardliness 
in the means employed to gain a cer- 



30 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST 

tain end, or to carry out a previously 
determined plan ; but after that plan 
has been carried out, there is never any 
waste of the smallest bit of material. 
Always every fragment is taken up and 
put to some new use "that nothing be 
lost;" there was no more characteris- 
tically divine saying than the direction 
given by Christ after the miracle of the 
loaves and fishes. 

Let your memory transmute itself 
into insight, passing into a higher and a 
better thing. Waste no vain regrets over 
it, and as to the flight of time, the hurry 
and bustle of the swiftly recurring, the 
swiftly vanishing days in which you 
would do so much, and in which, it 
seems to you, you can do so little, re- 
member 

' ' Yesterday, to-day, to-morrow come ; 

They hustle one another and they pass ,• 
But all our hustling morrows only make 
One smooth to-day of God." 



REST 31 

After all, every day which seems so 
long and so hard to us is only a part 
of the whole, and not a whole in itself ; 
and many a trouble and vexation, many 
a thing hard to bear and difficult to 
manage, will lose much of its impor- 
tance in our eyes if we can stop to re- 
member that it is only a part of a whole 
which we cannot see, and a component 
part of a smaller whole — the life given 
to us. If we say, " It is only a part " 
when it comes, and try to manage it as 
such, we shall find that it is not totally 
discouraging, and so can take hold of 
it with more confidence and trust. We 
are living not in a finished abode where 
we might have reason to expect regu- 
larity and completeness, nay, not even 
in a half-finished house, but really only 

IN THE QUARRY. 

Impatient, stung with pain and long delay, 
I chid the roughhewn stone that round me lay; 
I said — " What shelter art thou from the heat? 
What rest art thou for tired and wayworn feet ? 



32 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST 

What beauty hast thou for the longing eye ? 
Thou nothing hast my need to satisfy !" 
And then the patient stone fit answer made— 
" Most true, I am no roof with welcome shade; 
I am no house for rest, or full delight 
Of sculptured beauty for the weary sight ; 
Yet am I still material for all ; 
Use me as such — I answer to thy call ; 
Nay, tread me only under climbing feet, 
So serve I thee, my destiny complete ; 
Mount by me into freer, purer air, 
And find the roof that archeth everywhere ; 
So what but failure seems, shall build success, 
For all, as possible, thou dost possess." 

Who by the Universal squares his life, 
Sees but success in all its finite strife. 
In all that is, his truth-enlightened eyes 
Detect the May-be through its thin disguise ; 
And in the Absolute's unclouded sun, 
To him the two already are the one. 

We are too apt to forget that all we 
have now is only material. 

Of one thing we may be sure : away 
from rest, if that is what we are seek- 
ing, or after which we are longing, lead 
all small and petty thoughts, all mean- 



REST 



33 



ness and all narrow things, "pride, 
vainglory and hypocrisy, envy, hatred, 
and malice, and all uncharitableness." 
The roads to it are by all great and 
everlasting things, by humility, sinceri- 
ty, truth, magnanimity, forgiveness, and 
— in the noble and characteristic words 
of ex- Senator Edmunds — that "inex- 
tinguishable joy which comes from hav- 
ing been faithful to truth and self-re- 
spect. " When we have once found out 
that 



4 'Tis not the grapes of Canaan that repay, 
But the high faith that failed not by the 
way," 

we shall have found the place where 
Rest dwells 



34 



THE TECHNIQUE OF REST 



II 



NECESSITY 




SOME of us at least can re- 
member the house-keeping 
in old days, the extremest 
demands of which, in spite 
of the lapse of time, are still 
to be found in our New England towns. 
If we look at the work expected as a mat- 
ter of course from many a farmer's wife 
of to-day, we can only exclaim, " Who is 
sufficient for these things ?" She is up 
at four or five, and, finding perhaps her 
fire made for her, prepares the break- 
fast, washes and dresses the children, 
clears away the dishes, washes clothes, 
puts the house to rights, takes care of 
the milk, often of twenty cows, cleans 
and dries the pans and makes the but- 



NECESSITY 35 

ter. Meanwhile she is cooking the din- 
ner for three or four hungry men and 
serving it. Afterwards the dishes and 
what a little friend of mine used to call 
the " pot- pans "are to be washed and 
cleared off, though she has learned to 
put away nothing which is to be used 
for the next meal, but to lay those dishes 
and plates back on the table in prepa- 
ration for supper when the "men-folks" 
will be in from field work. The chil- 
dren are mostly taking care of them- 
selves in some of the many places so 
dear to the childish heart which a barn 
and all sorts of sheds offer, though they 
need intermittent attention and an ever- 
watchful ear ; then she mixes and bakes 
hot biscuit for tea, and has everything 
ready when the men -folks come, for 
often they can't afford to waste a min- 
ute, having to return to the fields. 
Then more dishes are to be washed 
and the table must be set in readiness 



36 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST 

for breakfast, the room cleaned, the 
lamp lighted, the children put to bed 
and the mending done, and so to sleep, 
provided a summons do not come from 
a neighboring farm-house that " My 
woman is too sick to be left alone, and 
I thought mebbe you would come in 
and help us for to-night." And so it 
goes on day after day in which all the 
water that is used must be drawn, or at 
the best, pumped outside the house, 
brought into the kitchen, carried wher- 
ever it is needed, and then when used, 
fetched out again, for in many a New 
England house to-day the luxury of a 
sink into which water can be poured is 
unknown. It should not be forgotten, 
either, that all this must be done with- 
out any helping hand. There is no 
servant to take up the ends of the 
work, such as to mop the floor after the 
main work is done, or to blacken the 
stove and "tidy up." No loose ends 






NECESSITY 37 

can be left, for they would only make 
more work for the next day, and that is 
not to be thought of. It is no wonder 
that the woman often looks forward 
with a real sense of rest to the very 
first weeks of the life of a new baby, 
because she knows that for that time 
at least, she can lie still and have some- 
body else do the manual labor, if not 
the thinking. 

I do not mean that the husband has 
been idle or neglectful. He, too, is 
busy ; but it is nevertheless true that 
if there be an errand which necessitates 
a " hitching up " of the horse and a 
drive to the village, he is generally the 
one to go, and thus at least he gets a 
little change, and the sight of other peo- 
ple with different interests from those 
on his own farm, while to the woman 
there is no such respite except once in 
a while the sewing- circle, which brings 
with it more dishes to wash and more 



38 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST 

cooking to do. Or if she takes the 
eggs — which in New England generally 
are, by an old traditional law, her per- 
quisite — to the village to sell, or rather 
to barter, she often finds herself con- 
fronted with the hard problem of pain- 
fully trying to contrive how she can 
manage to make a dress out of a very 
small pattern of calico — all that she can 
get in exchange, after spending the nec- 
essary amount for her husband's to- 
bacco. This is no exaggerated picture, 
as whoever will spend a summer in one 
of the back towns will learn, if he will 
take pains to become acquainted with 
the facts. 

This story may sound strange and 
far away ; but even in our cities fifty 
years ago, and with well-to-do families, 
all the water used had to be carried 
over the house ; for the running water, 
even where it was found, would not run 
above the first floor, and scarcely there 



NECESSITY 39 

on washing-days. All the dishes used 
at meals had to be brought to the din- 
ing-room from the kitchen on trays, 
generally up a flight of stairs, and taken 
back again in the same way afterwards. 
Any woman who has done this work or 
has seen it done, knows what an amount 
of labor it involves, if not to the house- 
keeper, then to the servants. Now we 
have running water and waste-pipes all 
over our houses; dumb-waiters for all 
sorts of purposes, and more servants 
than in those old days, and yet the 
work of the house is never done, and 
everybody is complaining of being tired. 
The ways of living have been rendered 
vastly easier by a multitude of inven- 
tions, by the increasing wealth of the 
country, by better and more intelligent 
service ; and yet life is by no means 
easier, but indeed harder. The de- 
mands on time, whether real or imag- 
ined, have increased in a greater ratio 



40 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST 

than the supply of facilities for answer- 
ing them, and as the earth provokingly 
continues to revolve on its axis just as 
rapidly as of old, the days are never 
long enough for all the duties which 
they bring. It is as if everybody had 
had dealings with Andersen's Moor 
Woman, " a venomous old creature and 
never idle," who, among other indus- 
tries, " sewed running leather to put into 
the shoes of human beings, so that they 
should never be at rest." The very ex- 
istence of the conveniences increases 
the number of possible accidents, and 
of calls on our attention. The more 
complicated the structure of an animal, 
the more in number are the possible de- 
rangements of the parts of that struct- 
ure — the more diseases it is liable to, 
and the more care must be spent to pre- 
serve health, or the more trained skill 
to restore it, if lost. Physicians multi- 
ply, and in the household the plumber's 



NECESSITY 41 

bill may become one of the regular ex- 
penses, as much as those of the grocer 
and the butcher. The woman who has 
seen water pouring out of her kitchen 
range because the "water-back " has 
burst during the night, and has consid- 
ered the resemblance in complication of 
the modern house to the human body, 
has ceased to wonder at the curious 
and almost incredible diseases which 
may befall either. If she be not too 
tired, she will look on, after that expe- 
rience, with a sort of amused wonder 
at what will happen next in a world 
where all things seem possible, and 
most of them probable. The care nec- 
essary in a modern house always re- 
minds one of the poor man who could 
never be perfectly dressed, because as 
soon as he got a new hat his shoes be- 
gan to wear out, and he hastily provided 
himself with new shoes only to find 
that his necktie was fraying, and so on 



42 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST 

forever. If there be not something the 
matter with the roof, you may be sure 
that there is with the cellar, and if the 
warm-water faucet in the kitchen does 
not drip, the gas-burners need attention. 
When we were little girls we could 
never succeed in " playing paper dolls." 
We were always cutting new dresses or 
hats for them in anticipation of enter- 
tainments which had no time to come 
off, because when they were all ready 
or almost ready for these great events, 
it grew dark, and it was time to put 
away our playthings and get ready for 
supper. It is very much the same with 
us now that we are only older children. 
We are always getting ready to live, and 
never having time enough to live. And 
by-and-by it begins to grow dark, and 
we must put up our playthings and go 
to bed. It is a pity, and there must be 
some way out of the mistake. Perhaps 
if we had not been so anxious to have 



NECESSITY 43 

our dolls so variously arrayed, they 
might have gone to more parties, and 
been happier dolls. But it is now too 
late to restore to them anything of the 
life which they lost, for they and their 
dresses and hats have long ago van- 
ished with the rest of our childish 
treasures. What we might have done 
for them and did not do, however, per- 
haps their memory may do for us, and 
then their paper lives will not have 
been in vain. 

We go on multiplying our conven- 
iences only to multiply our cares. We 
increase our possessions only to the en- 
largement of our anxieties. There is, I 
presume, no careful house-keeper who 
has not, in some desperate moment of 
going to the country or of returning 
therefrom, wished that civilization had 
never existed, and envied the freedom 
of the Indian woman who could peace- 
fully leave her wigwam to the prairie- 



44 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST 

dogs and carry her wardrobe on her 
back. But such wishes as these are 
unavailing; we are living in modern 
cities, and we must find some way out 
of our own problems, not falling into 
"blue-rose melancholy/' which is of all 
things the narrowest and the most hope- 
less. We are not alone in the trouble 
forced upon us by the innumerable in- 
ventions, products of the intense men- 
tal activity of the time into which we 
were born. All the comfort to be de- 
rived from the knowledge that we are 
only a part of a large company, we 
have. The old farmer, ruefully con- 
templating his potato patch, says, " It 
does somehow seem as if every time a 
man invented a new machine to save 
us work, the Lord invented a new bug I" 
But as we can fight fire most success- 
fully with fire, so we must fight the 
army of inventions with our own. Build- 
ings are not fire-proof unless they are 



NECESSITY 45 

built of material that has had the fire 
itself for godmother. To our own pow- 
er of invention, therefore, we must turn 
if we would not be overcome. The 
spirit of the age, which has stimulated 
the mental activity of other people, has 
not left us untouched; and though it 
seems sometimes as if it were an un- 
equal fight with the whole world against 
one woman, we may avail ourselves of 
our quickened power of thinking to 
create and utilize many little devices 
which, though small in themselves, will 
help not a little to smooth our way. 

First among these may, perhaps, be 
counted, increasing the elasticity of our 
income. In our day, needs and desires 
grow faster than the bank account. But 
what we have is, after all, only the ratio 
between the two, and not either by it- 
self. If we can't increase the latter, 
we have the ability to lessen the former, 
and the result in peace of mind, and 



46 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST 

consequently in power to battle cool- 
ly and successfully with what we have 
to do, will be just so much increased. 
The suggesting of this might belong 
as properly to the chapter on Freedom. 
As an English writer says, "The great 
thing in these circumstances is to avoid, 
as much as possible, breaking into the 
precious coins, and testing the resources 
of what that clever woman, Ann Taylor 
(Mrs. Gilbert), called the eminent firm, 
Messrs. Hook, Crook & Co. There 
was once an upper servant, valuable in 
many ways, who, when her new mis- 
tress gave her an undergarment to patch 
and the wherewithal to accomplish it, 
observed, ' I will do my best, madam, 
but I have never worn anything patched 
myself.' That young person never 
found her income elastic, though she 
lived to desire that it had been so, but 
she did not go the right way to work. 
It is mainly by judicious patching, mend- 



NECESSITY 47 

ing, turning about, and the preserva- 
tion of unconsidered trifles, that middle- 
class incomes can be made elastic, and 
the kind of life that consists of an end- 
less succession of calls, afternoon teas, 
and tennis tournaments does not con- 
duce to it at all. The possessors of 
narrow incomes should purchase wisely 
and at fixed times, if they mean to make 
the best of everything; and if only they 
have a little stock of ready cash to 
start with, they can buy when and where 
they see what suits them, By fixed times 
we mean at the after - season summer ' 
and winter sales, instead of starting out 
to buy summer frocks in May and win- 
ter ones in October, when thin or thick 
materials, as the case may be, are in 
season. It is really very difficult to in- 
crease the purchasing power of money, 
but time is money in the one sense that 
time may be made to serve instead of 
money ; and there are thousands of 



48 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST 

families where breakfast is early, in or- 
der that the masculine portion may go 
to business, and the women have long, 
clear days before them in which to 
make the best of things, and yet can 
have the hour's reading or rest, or the 
occasional outing that redeems life from 
dulness, while the pleasure of proving 
that a given income can be made elastic 
will add zest to every effort." It is 
probably the case that far more pleas- 
ure comes from the contriving of means 
to make a thing " do," and succeeding, 
• than would have resulted from the pur- 
chasing of a new one. For the woman 
who is " dead tired " with planning and 
contriving, it is doubtless a great relief 
to buy at once the new thing, but just 
now, in our country at least, many wom- 
en are tired for the lack of the pleasure 
which comes from planning. For plan- 
ning comes next to creating, and to cre- 
ate is essentially the part of woman. 



NECESSITY 49 

There would not have been so much 
pleasure in the Creation if it had not 
been preceded by chaos. To overcome 
difficulty is pleasure, because it gives 
always a sense of power, than which 
there is nothing more agreeable. To 
have power, and to use it, is a great joy ; 
just as the possession of power shut out 
from its exercise is the hardest thing to 
bear. As to income, then, let us over- 
come the necessity which confronts us, 
with our own freedom in invention. 
Whenever we conquer necessity with 
freedom, we discover that they are the 
same, and do not need the dialectic of 
the metaphysician to convince us of the 
fact. If we would know of the doctrine, 
we must do the work; otherwise we shall 
only humbly trust that it is so. 

To secure time for all we have to do, 
we must offset the rapidity of its flight 
by reducing as many of our actions as 
possible to automatism. Doing this, 



50 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST 

we shall not only perform them more 
quickly at the time, acting, as we shall, 
like a machine, but we shall set free a 
large proportion of the thinking power 
we have, to be applied to work which 
may refresh us instead of wearying. I 
quote from a recent article in the An- 
dover Review: "The extension of au- 
tomatic action in the lower range of 
faculties is the enlargement of freedom 
and power in realizing the higher ob- 
jects of personal life, for it is growing 
facility in the application of means to 
ends. The more things a man can do 
without conscious effort, in the use of 
his bodily powers, in the use of reason- 
ing faculties, of memory, of languages, 
of music, the wider range he has in the 
great pursuits of literature, science, phi- 
losophy, art, and religion. He has more 
power and he has wider area. Animals 
have more automatic action at the start, 
but make little appreciable gain upon 



NECESSITY 51 

it, and get no release for higher uses. 
Man, by increasing his unconscious and 
subconscious action, of which he has but 
little at the start, widens his range con- 
tinually, and increases the effectiveness 
of his personality, which guides native 
and acquired powers to the ends he 
may choose. And there is no ascer- 
tained limit to enlargement of power 
through the extension of habitual ac- 
tion into the various facilities of which 
man is capable." Leaving aside the 
bearing of this fact upon the question 
of immortality, of which the writer in 
the Review goes on to speak, we cannot 
read these words without seeing that to 
have our thinking power set free from 
the common, every-day affairs of daily 
life, is exactly the thing we are most 
earnestly striving towards. The more 
we reduce ourselves to machines in the 
lower things, the more force we shall 
set free to use in the higher. 



52 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST 

When we first began to walk, we had 
to give our attention to every step, or 
indeed, to the working of every muscle 
engaged in taking those steps. We 
have only to notice the anxious expres- 
sion on the face of the child during his 
first lesson in the difficult accomplish- 
ment to appreciate this. Now we walk 
without thinking of what we are doing. 
We can carry on a train of thought while 
walking, so deep that we may not know 
we are moving at all. This is because 
that activity has become automatic. In 
psychological language, the lines of dis- 
charge of the cells in our brain, neces- 
sary to produce in proper order the com- 
pound action of walking, have been set 
in activity so many times and kept in ac- 
tivity so long at a time, that now all we 
have to do is, as it were, to touch off 
the explosion of the first cell of the se- 
ries, and the discharge of the others 
follows in regular order. It is like the 



NECESSITY 53 

fall of a row of card houses. We knock 
down the first of the line, and that is 
all that is necessary. But if, in our walk, 
we come upon an uneven place, we then 
at once become conscious of the level 
of the ground, and set our foot down 
with care; or if it be in a dangerous 
spot, with some degree of anxiety. The 
course of our thought is checked for 
the time, for the thinking power has 
had to give its attention to minor mat- 
ters. When the ground is level again, 
the brain hands back the work to its 
servants and resumes its own more con- 
genial occupation. It is very much the 
same with house -keeping. As long 
as the house is well organized, and 
the daily work running in its habitual 
grooves, it runs itself, so to speak. But 
if a new emergency arise or a change 
of servants occur, the mind of the mis- 
tress can no longer be given to her fa- 
vorite occupations. She finds herself 



54 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST 

dragged down from any thinking on 
restful themes to the pulverizing cares 
of daily life until she can reorganize 
and again deliver over the work to the 
hands of her executive officers. The 
multitude of things which we have 
learned by repeated effort to do auto- 
matically is already greater than we 
should suppose unless we reflect on it, 
from the very reason that we no longer 
think about them. Watch the motion 
of your hands and fingers when button- 
ing your boot, and you will see how 
complicated is the seemingly simple 
act, and how they move with the regu- 
larity of the levers in a machine back 
and forth, back and forth, while you go 
on talking and have no recollection of 
having done anything ; or, while you 
are taking a new needleful of thread 
from the spool as you are sewing, look 
to see where you are holding your nee- 
dle. I venture to assert that you do 



NECESSITY 55 

not know where it has been tucked 
away for the moment in order to allow 
you the use of your forefinger, and yet 
you will find it carefully disposed of, and 
by nine hundred and ninety-nine women 
out of a thousand in precisely the same 
place. These are good examples of 
automatic action. Did you ever try to 
teach any one how to make tatting ? If 
you have, you will have found out that 
although you can do it yourself without 
any trouble, you do not really know 
how you do it. The woodsman will tell 
in the depth of winter by a glance of 
the eye what is the name of the tree, 
but he cannot tell you how he knows. 
He has so many times observed and 
combined in his mind all the charac- 
teristics of the tree that he knows it as 
soon as he sees it. To become con- 
scious of processes is the part of a spe- 
cialist : it is, for example, to be fit for a 
teacher. In ordinary life, driven as we 



56 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST 

modern women are, by so many and 
differing demands, we must banish all 
minor matters possible to the region of 
automatism. And we need not feel 
that in so doing we are giving up any 
portion of our prerogative as thinking 
beings. Just that we might think to 
some purpose were we gifted with this 
faculty of performing our work like au- 
tomata, and in its use lies absolutely 
our only hope for the present as against 
the ever -increasing demands of daily 
life. 

We should endeavor to put all things 
which are of no value in themselves, 
but are only means to ends, under the 
control of automatic or mechanical ac- 
tion. There are a hundred things which 
must be looked after, a hundred orders 
that must be given, a hundred errands 
to be done in order that the family may 
have a comfortable and a restful home. 
But though they are of importance in 



NECESSITY 57 

that light — for the comfort of other peo- 
ple — they are of no further use. It is 
important for that day and for that trip 
that the conductor should have a memory 
of the faces of the passengers on the train. 
He goes through the cars many times, 
and seldom makes a mistake in recog- 
nizing a new passenger, or in failing to 
recognize an old one. This has be- 
come automatic with him. But, the 
trip once over, and the passengers safe- 
ly disposed of, he clears his memory of 
them as easily as one washes figures 
from a slate, and has a fresh memory 
for the next set as he passes through 
the train on his next trip, his brain me- 
chanically taking a picture of each car 
in the train as he goes through for the 
first time. The girl is going to college. 
Among the professors under the fire of 
whose examination she is to come is 
one w T ho is known to be a great stickler 
for dates, even to the unit figure, and 



58 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST 

a warm partisan of a certain authority 
on ancient dates as opposed to another 
theory. What is she to do if she is to 
pass that examination and gain the 
privileges of the college ? She must 
commit to memory long lists of dates 
as important in any culture as the date 
of the birth of Rameses II. As she 
has an end to gain she does this, all 
the time with the consciousness lying 
back of her mental activity that the 
list is of no real use to her, further than 
to reach the Freshman Class. She 
passes the examination satisfactorily, 
winning warm commendation from the 
Professor of History, and in a week's 
time has forgotten all the dates. This 
is the story of many an examination 
and of the knowledge which has been 
sought in order to pass it. It seems to 
make a difference in the retaining pow- 
er of the memory if we know that the 
facts we are acquiring are to be used 



NECESSITY 59 

for a special purpose only. What we 
iearn for the sake of knowing, we hold ; 
what we learn for the sake of accom- 
plishing some ulterior end, we forget so 
soon as that end has been gained. This, 
too, is automatic action in the constitu- 
tion of the mind itself, and it is fortu- 
nate and merciful that it is so, for oth- 
erwise our minds would be soon only 
rubbish-rooms. 

A very simple and useful device is 
to have a memorandum-book, so small 
that it can be easily carried in the pock- 
et, to be used instead of your mind to 
keep note of any errand or any appoint- 
ment that you may have. The Stand- 
ard Diary, less than four inches long 
and less than two and a half inches 
wide, is one of the best for this pur- 
pose. Besides a page for every day in 
the year, it has pages for memoranda, 
where you can keep notes of such facts 
as the amount of goods needed for any 



60 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST 

garment, or trimming for any article 
which you are in the habit of using, 
so that you will not have to calculate 
over and over again the quantity to be 
bought. You will not have to stop, as 
you are going out, to say, " Let me see ! 
I forget how much we need of that for 
Mary's dress." With true perception of 
the value of time, this diary has added 
lately a special page for putting down 
many of these things, such as number 
of gloves, sizes of collar, stockings, cuffs, 
shoes, number of bank-book, number of 
bicycle, etc. It contains, also, all the 
postage rates, directions for help in case 
of accidents, antidotes for the most com- 
mon poisons, the list of divisions for 
standard time, church festivals, and all 
astronomical information needed, un- 
less by the master of a ship. At the 
end is a condensed cash account for 
every month of the year, and several 
pages devoted to addresses such as 






NECESSITY 6l 

those you are most commonly asked 
for and want always at hand: the name 
and exact address, for instance, of that 
pale-faced young girl who wants sew- 
ing to do at home, and whom you want 
to recommend to your friends ; that of 
the teacher who gave you French les- 
sons last year, and whom you found so 
excellent. There are four pages each 
given to calls and to letters, with col- 
umns for checking them off as returned 
or answered. The number of pages al- 
lotted to the former would seem to in- 
dicate that, in the opinion of the editor 
of this diary, it is not likely that a busy 
woman will have much time to spend 
in making calls which are merely a mat- 
ter of form, where neither of the parties 
engaged can think of anything to say 
to the other except at the cost of much 
diligent ransacking of the tired brain 
and much invention. In fact, such di- 
aries as these, in their wide range of 



62 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST 

information, would seem to be all t,hat 
one needs in practical life, the only 
other book that at all approaches them 
in this respect being unquestionably 
Webster's Unabridged Dictionary. And 
all this information is contained within 
a tiny well -bound book only half an 
inch thick, and with excellent paper and 
type. I speak of the binding because I 
have repeatedly proved that it will last 
through the whole year, and be in good 
order at the end, after having been car- 
ried in all sorts of pockets every day 
and having been opened thousands of 
times. 

As I am speaking of small things, I 
may be allowed to add that if a rubber 
ring be put round the first part of the 
book, shutting up all the past days, it 
will open always at the place you want, 
that is, at to-day, so that you will not 
have to waste any time in hunting for 
the duties you are in search of. I say 



NECESSITY 63 

round the first part of the book, be- 
cause the pages belonging to the com- 
ing days want to be left always open 
for any engagement you may make for 
them. If you have an errand for a cer- 
tain day, put down the address on the 
page where it belongs when you make 
the engagement. Then you can dismiss 
it from your mind, and when the day 
comes you will find it there as you look 
over your book for what you have to do 
on that day. When you have done the 
errand, mark it off then and there by 
drawing a line through the memoran- 
dum. If at the close of the day you find, 
on looking over your artificial memory, 
that some of the things have not been 
lined off, showing that they have not 
been done, transfer these items to the 
next page, marking them off with a 
cross instead of a straight line. You 
will thus be sure that nothing has been 
left unthought of, and your work for 



64 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST 

each day will, as far as possible, be 
shaped out for you in advance. Be- 
sides the mental rest which you will 
gain by being sure thus that none of all 
the little things are forgotten, you will 
begin to find an additional amount of 
rest, from the feeling which you will 
have that your work is laid out for you 
— as if you were under the direction of 
some one else, and that person one who 
is not confused by the multifarious de- 
mands of the present, but who plans 
for you in quiet and in advance. It is 
largely the constant making of decisions 
that tires us. To the list of duties for 
the day which you find thus prescribed 
for you, you will add others as you look 
it over in the morning before starting 
out on your walk. And when you have 
the list complete, arrange your different 
errands, if they be many, in the most 
convenient order for taking them up, 
bearing in mind the street- car routes 



NECESSITY 65 

and other arrangements of the city 
where you live, and jot them down in 
order on a card which you can slip un- 
der the elastic on the outside of the 
book as you drop it into your pocket 
Then follow your list of work laid out 
automatically, and you will do your er- 
rands with very much less fatigue, be- 
ing relieved of a hundred little anxie- 
ties which, though small, do have a great 
cumulative power, and really tire one 
more than we should suppose. 

If you are a very busy woman, and 
must be so, rule the pages of your little 
book into columns for morning, after- 
noon, and evening; or, if it be more 
convenient, for in-the-house and out- 
of-the-house business respectively, and 
you will be still more helped in your 
duties for the day by this classification. 
I know that some will interpose the ob- 
jection here that I am suggesting more 
trouble than I shall succeed in avoid- 




66 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST 

ing. I know well enough that there is 
a mania for order in the minds of some 
people that really makes more trouble 
than the disorder which it seeks to pre- 
vent ; but I can only say that I am giv- 
ing the results of the experience of a 
very hard-worked woman who has car- 
ried on for many years both woman's 
and man's work, and that without any 
respite, and who yet finds herself now 
far stronger and abler for work than 
most of the women who have had, com- 
pared with her, almost nothing to do. 
It can never be often enough repeated 
that it is the constant succession of lit- 
tle things and small anxieties that wear 
upon us, and not the great things. The 
only wise way for us is to hand over as 
many little things as possible to the 
care of automatism, and to conquer 
monotony by bringing larger and more 
fruitful interests into our minds in the 
space thus left free. It is always a 



NECESSITY 67 

positive gain of time to make our plans 
beforehand and in quiet, when we can 
see clearly. It is like taking directions 
from Philip sober instead of from Philip 
drunk, arrd that saves time and useless 
work. 

As to the smoothness of the house- 
work, it is an undoubted fact that the 
reason why so many women have con- 
tinual trouble with their servants is that 
they do not give clear directions, and 
then find fault because the directions are 
not followed, or they make such uncer- 
tain and varying demands that the best 
and most anxious to please become dis- 
couraged. Servants, as well as any one 
else, like to have something certain to 
depend upon, and will serve more will- 
ingly often, though they have more to do, 
where they have their work clearly laid 
out for them, and where they feel per- 
fectly sure that if they follow orders they 
are not going to be found fault with. I 



68 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST 

know that all the fault does not lie di- 
rectly at the door of the employer, but 
I think we do not perhaps realize how 
much of it lies there indirectly. It is a 
strong desire of the human race to fall 
back into a state of mechanism. There 
is nothing which the average mind so 
strongly and so constantly craves as rules 
and definite statements. Teachers know 
this, and their one effort during all the 
school-hours may be said to be to shake 
the pupils' minds out of the tendency 
to mechanism, and to force them into 
a state of self - activity. But with the 
house-keeper, the question is not how 
to train immature minds, but how to get 
the work done decently and in order. 
The object for her is the quietness, or- 
der, and comfort of the house, and the 
servants are only means to this end ; 
so she may conscientiously allow them 
to fall into habits of mechanism as to 
the greater part of their work. Their 



NECESSITY 69 

daily routine should be laid out for 
them for each day of the week, and 
trouble and dispute will be saved by 
putting it down in writing, and having 
the programme fastened up where they 
can refer to it. It is a question of sav- 
ing time and the annoyance which pre- 
vents clear action of the mind, and it 
makes not much difference how little 
the gain may be, if it be only a gain. 
Whatever can be saved in this way will 
bear fruit a hundred-fold in the comfort 
of those who are dearer to us than our- 
selves, for there is no Calumet or Hecla 
mine that pays so large dividends as 
Home. 

Let there be constant watchfulness 
over the stores always kept in the house, 
so that no one of them shall ever be suf- 
fered to run out. Always order more be- 
fore the supply comes quite to an end, 
and then you will never be driven to 
hurry by an unexpected demand coming 



70 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST 

at the most inopportune time, for more 
of this or that. It is best always to have 
a written list of all these regular stores, 
and to be sure in this way that they are 
always on hand, not trusting to your 
memory; always save your memory by 
paper memories, as to all small details. 
The greatest order should be insisted 
on, not only in the general house- 
hold, but in all personal belongings. 
There can hardly be too much careful 
arrangement here. The old New Eng- 
land saying of " a place for everything 
and everything in its place " is in need 
of revival by those of us who want time 
saved for relief. If we are not the pos- 
sessors of an instinct for order, we must 
create and diligently cultivate it. As 
to the many small articles of a woman's 
wardrobe — which should always be so 
arranged that she can get any of them 
in the dark as well as in the light — a 
little of the invention, always necessary 



NECESSITY 71 

if we are to find our way out of the dif- 
ficulty that we are living in, will be suf- 
ficient to instruct a carpenter so that 
there may be in the top drawer a place 
for everything, out of which it cannot 
slip because of partitions which shut it 
in. I have a friend who has her shoe- 
drawer also arranged in divisions, so 
that she never has to stop to hunt for 
the mate to a shoe, the pairs lying al- 
ways together. Some may think this 
a useless thing, but I happen to know 
that this woman does an almost incred- 
ible amount of work in different lines, 
and that she never keeps anybody who 
has an engagement with her waiting for 
one moment. These results may seem 
worthy of attainment, as they certainly 
enable her to meet the many calls upon 
her attention in a quiet frame of mind. 
It is the little foxes that spoil the vines, 
and the little things that tell upon nerv- 
ous strength. At the desk, whenever 



72 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST 

anything is done with, it should be at 
once restored to its place, and not left 
lying round to be looked up when want- 
ed again. Pencils, rulers, and blotters 
should come under this stern rule, the 
carrying out of which will soon form a 
habit, and save in the total a great 
amount of time. These are only the 
simplest rules of business. As it is un- 
doubtedly an advantage to American" 
homes that so many of the wives and 
mothers have served as teachers before 
becoming house-directors, so it will be 
an advantage that so many young wom- 
en are getting now some degree of train- 
ing through their employment in offices 
and at cash-desks. They will carry with 
them into their future homes the busi- 
ness habits there acquired, which are 
only the gradually summed-up experi- 
ence of many generations of business 
men interested in doing things in the 
shortest possible time, and the homes 



NECESSITY 73 

will be benefited thereby. Before you 
begin to work, see that every one of the 
small tools you are to use is in the most 
convenient place for reaching it, so that 
you may not have to make one unnec- 
essary movement, and you will be sur- 
prised to find with how little expendi- 
ture of force you will do the work. Few 
women probably reflect, as they sit in 
their comfortable chairs at a theatre and 
enjoy the smooth performance without 
a hitch or break, upon the amount of 
order and preparation indispensable to 
produce the result which charms them. 
A visit to the property-room and a little 
talk with the man or woman in charge 
might be a good lesson upon the effect 
of thorough order and previous arrange- 
ment in preventing friction. You see 
the actor reach for the pen or for some 
little thing required by the play, and 
you do not think that it was the busi- 
ness of some one to see that all these 



74 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST 

little unnumbered trifles should be in 
the particular place where they were 
wanted at precisely the time when they 
were wanted ; and the next day at din- 
ner you find fault sharply with the serv- 
ant because necessary articles are not 
on the table. Perhaps it was not the 
fault of the servant so much as that of 
some one else. It is little things like 
these that destroy the whole comfort of 
a dinner-table, and vex and annoy oth- 
ers besides yourself. It is so much easier 
to prevent trouble than to cure it ! A lit- 
tle more order in the household arrange- 
ments, a little more carefully planned 
directions to the servants, and, above 
all, a little more of the oversight of the 
trained eye beforehand, would save so 
much friction and spare yourself so 
much fatigue ; for most of the women 
who will read these words are not tired 
with bodily labor directly, but only with 
the exhaustion coming from the men- 



NECESSITY 75 

tal friction which follows them every 
day, and with the constant effort to 
keep things smooth and to do all their 
duty. 

So closely are the mind and body 
related that the very effort at keeping 
things in order will tend to spread order 
in the thought, so that clear thinking 
and clear directions, which are its re- 
sult, will day by day become easier. 
Go on, patiently putting and keeping 
outside things in order, and you will 
find that after a while you are begin- 
ning to gain a mental grip of the prob- 
lems which beset you. They will fall 
into order, and take their places accord- 
ing to their proper relations. It is use- 
less trying to have any real order in a 
school of children where the maps on 
the walls are awry, chairs and tables 
crooked, and the interiors of the desks 
a scene of wild confusion, as if the 
books had been tipped in like coal from 



76 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST 

a cart. So you are not able to think in 
order clearly and logically in a room 
where everything is in confusion. In 
the same way, if you want to rest with 
your mind, you must learn first of all to 
keep ail parts of the body quiet — that is, 
to have them under control. If you try 
to stop a street-car, and the driver takes 
no notice of you, diligently regarding 
the fine proportions of a steeple in the 
distance, though you may not yet be 
able to see him go by with profound 
quietness of mind, you can at least re- 
frain from expressing your feelings. 
After you have done this a sufficient 
number of times, holding yourself in 
perfect serenity so far as the outward 
woman is concerned, you will be agree- 
ably surprised to find that you begin 
not to be so provoked as was your wont. 
Try it. Learn not to play with your 
watch-chain, not to swing your shop- 
ping-bag slowly back and forth, not per- 



NECESSITY 77 

petually to caress the handle of your 
umbrella as you ride. Learn to keep 
still, and you will feel the quieting in- 
fluence all through your life. If the 
train stops, don't ask a hundred ques- 
tions, which don't concern you, as to 
the cause of the delay. Do not seek 
for information of which you can make 
no use. When the steamer goes slowly 
because of fog, do not attack the cap- 
tain every time he appears on deck with 
your inquiries as to whether he thinks 
he will run into an iceberg or another 
vessel, or whether there is always fog 
in that part of the ocean, and a hun- 
dred others, so various as to leave no 
doubt in the mind of any one who lis- 
tens to them of the great power of in- 
vention of their propounder. The cap- 
tain will perhaps answer, gruffly, as I 
heard one do, that he has never lived 
there and can't tell. The woman who 
received this answer felt doubtless that 



I Post 






78 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST 

she had been hardly treated, but she 
had only herself to blame. 

Learn to keep still outwardly, even 
as to hands and the tips of your fingers, 
as to feet and head, and you will find 
rest and quiet coming to the mind as a 
result. If you are ill, lie quiet if it be 
possible, and it will generally be found 
so. Lie still, and don't allow yourself 
to toss about. Sit still when you sit, 
and stand still when you must stand. 
Try this constantly and persistently 
and you will not fail of help. Allow 
yourself to make no motion that has 
not a purpose and an aim ; if you find 
yourself moving unnecessarily, call your- 
self back to quietness. No one can tell 
how much of the beautiful serenity of 
the Quakers comes from the outward 
stillness and quiet of their worship. 
Watch other people to be convinced 
how much muscular and nervous force 
is actually thrown away for nothing. 



NECESSITY 79 

Do not allow yourself to move nerv- 
ously fast, and the more nervous you 
are, the more deliberate all motions 
should be. Force yourself to move 
slowly even if you are in a hurry. In 
walking, the tread of the city policeman 
is an excellent model for one to imitate, 
though there is no danger that you will 
succeed in copying it exactly. When 
at your desk and with not much time 
to spare, the pencil falls on the floor, 
and the ruler won't be picked up, your 
eye-glass string catches on a button, 
you can't find the blotter, and the pa- 
per on which were the memoranda you 
were copying just gets up from the 
desk and plunges, without any obvious 
motive-power but its own will, into the 
waste-basket; or when, another day, 
scissors slip to the floor, the knot which 
you are sure you had made at the end 
of your basting-thread is not there, the 
button-hole-twist kinks, knots, and, tak- 



80 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST 

ing on a life of its own, becomes a self 
flinging lasso in pursuit of any game, 
and the needle, going through perilous- 
ly hard, finally snaps into three pieces ; 
in short when — to use Gail Hamilton's 
felicitous phrase — the " total depravity 
of inanimate things " is manifestly in 
the ascendant, that is the time for de- 
lay and dallying. When you are wait- 
ing for a train, don't keep perpetually 
looking to see if it is coming. The 
time of its arrival is the business of 
the conductor, not yours. It will not 
come any sooner for all your nervous 
glances and your impatient pacing, and 
you will save strength if you will keep 
quiet. After we discover that the peo- 
ple who sit still on a long railroad jour- 
ney reach that journey's end at pre- 
cisely the same time as those who 
" fuss " continually, we have a valuable 
piece of information which we should 
not fail to put to practical use. 



NECESSITY 8l 

If you were asked to raise one hun- 
dred and twenty pounds twelve or thir- 
teen feet you would probably answer 
that you were not strong enough to do it ? 
and yet that is what you do every time 
that you go up a flight of stairs. You do 
not think of that, but it is worth while 
for you to do so, and to make wise 
choice of the muscles with which you 
will do the work. It is not the best 
way to place only the ball of your foot 
on the stair, throw yourself forward, 
and then do the lifting with the muscles 
of the back. If, instead of this, you 
will plant the whole foot on the step, 
and then simply straighten the knee, 
keeping yourself perfectly erect, you 
will find that much fatigue is saved ; 
and in city houses there are many stairs 
to be climbed in the course of a day. 
Take care of yourself in such little 
ways as these. Try in every w T ay to ac- 
quire a habit of quietness. God has 



82 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST 

mercifully built us so that habits are 
easily formed. Help yourself out of 
the stores of aid which He has pro- 
vided for you from the foundation of 
the world. 

And if you must have tonics, take 
those also from Him, in sunshine, pure 
air, exercise, regular hours, healthful 
food, and, above all perhaps, in sleep. 
Religiously avoid all others. It is vain 
hoping to restore nerve -power by re- 
course to medicine. All such attempts 
are but patches, which only take from 
the garment, making the rent worse. 
An English physician has recently said 
of the maladies which imply or consist 
in loss of nerve-power, such as suppress- 
ed gout, hysteria, neuralgia, insomnia, 
chorea, epilepsy, melancholia, and gen- 
eral loss of mental control, that " all 
this class of ills are, as a rule, whether 
they be hereditary in their origin or not — 
and very often they are hereditary — ex- 



NECESSITY 83 

tremely gradual and slow in their onset, 
arising, as they do, from deep-rooted, 
constitutional causes." He maintains, 
therefore, that they can be successfully 
combated " only by very cautious and 
gradual remedies — remedies which do 
not cause any reaction but which slow- 
ly steal into the system, and restore 
its strength by gradually accumulating, 
without stimulating, the resources from 
which nerve-power is derived. Strong 
nerve-tonics are in such cases mischiev- 
ous, and sedatives positively injurious. 
A healthy plan of life, with air, exercise, 
and nutritive food are of the first im- 
portance." This point can hardly be 
enough insisted upon. What you have 
done by a long series of drafts upon 
your nerve strength, whether necessary 
or not, can be made up only by a long 
series of efforts at patience and of will- 
power to keep yourself still and in the 
way of recovery. You cannot hurry 



84 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST 

the processes of the Creator, however 
much you may desire to do so — 

' ' Though the mills of God grind slowly, yet 
they grind exceeding small." 

If you have learned by experience of 
the exceeding smallness of the grind- 
ing, you must also learn practically of 
the exceeding slowness of the machin- 
ery. There is no other way„ 

We should hardly go to Earle's Eng- 
lish Prose to find advice about bodily 
health, and yet at the foot of page 210 
is this sentence : " Ailing people fancy 
that some specific might in a minute 
put them all to rights il only they could 
chance upon it; not considering that 
health is the result of a harmonious con- 
dition of a highly complex organization, 
and that the main secret lies in the con- 
duct and regulation of that life which is 
its animating centre." Professor Earle 
is speaking of diction, and of the idea 



Post Office Dept 

^111896 ; 






7A 



NECESSITY 85 

which many writers have, that " it is a 
sovereign specific of diction to use 
short words/' If the practice of medi- 
cine consisted in the giving of specifics, 
physicians would be of very little use. 
All that we should need would be a 
book with the remedy for every trouble 
set down in a column opposite to the 
name of the disease. Teachers are very 
often confronted by the same miscon- 
ception on the part of parents, who seem 
to think that instruction, instead of be- 
ing a live process, consists in a sort of 
knack, a certain method which has only 
to be applied to the children like a plas- 
ter, to insure success in the school. 
They seem to think that teachers have 
in some way been inducted into a se- 
cret method, and that anybody could 
teach if he were a participator of the 
secret " method." This is the idea of 
all quackery, in whatever profession, 
and the fact that so many who have 



86 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST 

over-used their nerve-force expect to re- 
cover at once, if only they could find 
the tonic suited to their case is a proof 
how wide-spread is the belief in quack- 
ery and quacks. If you are nerve-tired, 
do not be induced to trust to tonics of 
any kind, and never to sedatives if you 
hope to make any real gain. Tea, cof- 
fee, and alcohol will not help you now. 
You have used them before as your al- 
lies in evading obedience to the plain- 
est rules of health; do not hope that 
they will act as such in the effort to re- 
gain it. And remember always that 
you must give some thought, and a con- 
siderable amount of it, too, to the care 
of your health if you expect to be of 
any use in the world, or comfort to any- 
body. It is only in such ways as have 
been here indicated that you can meet 
the demands of modern life, and con- 
quer necessity. What you are to try 
to acquire above all is what the Satur- 



NECESSITY 87 

day Review characterizes as "repose, 
and the calm power frequently associ- 
ated with it which is greatly lacking in 
the sons and daughters of the latter 
part of the nineteenth century." Look 
carefully through all the claims press- 
ing upon you in your complicated life, 
and decide once and for all what it is 
that is the one really important and 
overmastering duty in it, and should 
be the one dominating aim. Then re- 
member that if you succeed in that, the 
others, so multifarious, are really no 
more than the fringe of the garment, 
and that you need not spend so much 
anxiety over them, provided that the one 
most important is faithfully attended to. 
What that is for each woman, no other 
person can decide for her. 



88 



THE TECHNIQUE OF REST 



III 



FREEDOM 




>LL real freedom springs 
from necessity, for it can 
be gained only through the 
exercise of the individual 
will, and that will can be 
roused to energetic action only by the 
force of necessity acting upon it from 
the outside to spur it to effort. The 
necessity, as we call it, under which we 
labor, comes mostly from the outside 
and from the physical world, while the 
freedom to which it leads or rather 
pushes us is of the spirit. There is no 
real contradiction between the two. 
Our " must " is determined by the di- 
rection in which we voluntarily set our 
faces, and so is superimposed upon us 



FREEDOM 89 

by our own wills. We set up a certain 
aim, and put ourselves of our own will 
into the power of a certain current. 
Once having done that, we find our- 
selves committed to usages and customs 
which we had not before fully known, 
but from which we cannot depart with- 
out giving up the end which we have 
chosen. But we have no right, there- 
fore, to claim that we are under the 
yoke of necessity. We might as well 
say that the man whom we see struggling 
vainly in the current of Niagara could 
not have helped jumping in. He de- 
liberately chose the leap and preferred 
to trust himself to the water rather than 
to the land, and he was allowed his 
choice. The woman who marries be- 
cause she desires diamonds and foreign 
travel, and gets both, has no right to 
complain afterwards that she has no 
love or companionship, and no home. 
She made her bargain, and was paid in 



go THE TECHNIQUE OF REST 

the coin that she asked, and fully. She 
chose her own lot, and should accept 
it in silence and not talk about "hard 
fate." The woman who makes her en- 
trance into a set of society must not 
complain if she finds that society is 
satisfied with no half-hearted devotion. 
She has lost the right to say that she 
has no time for such or such a duty. 
She has all the time that there is, all 
that any one can have ; she has chosen 
to spend it in a special direction ; it is 
not that she has not had it to apply as 
she chose. 

The feverish emulation of Americans 
to excel each other in the ways of u so- 
ciety" is responsible for a large amount 
of the weariness and the nervous pros- 
tration which are charged -up against 
necessary demands upon our time, 
though they do not belong there. Maria 
Mitchell used to say to women who, 
pleading for help, urged that they " must 



FREEDOM 91 

live,'* that there was not the slightest 
necessity for living, and, moreover, that 
if there were, the almshouse was always 
open, a fact which she declared to be 
of great comfort to herself. It was only 
her brusque way of saying that many 
things which people generally put in 
the domain of the necessary really do 
lie in that of the unnecessary, or of 
freedom. Those women who read Mar- 
cus Aurelius, and who know that " the 
life is more than meat and the body 
than raiment," do not need to be told 
where Freedom lies. The others who 
cry piteously for more freedom may 
have come across the statement, " Who 
would be free, themselves must strike 
the blow," but have perchance never 
thought that it referred to any one but 
the Swiss mountaineers or the struggling 
patriots of Greece. To be free in any 
sense, a certain amount of independence 
is necessary, nor can Freedom be pur- 



92 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST 

chased at any other price. It would 
seem imperative that society, so called, 
should exist, for otherwise how would 
the horses have their manes pulled and 
their tails docked, each one blunter 
than the other ; and what would become 
of the manufacturers of bearing-reins ? 
There must be a gilded image to set up 
if we are going to build a temple. These 
facts seem irrefragable. But there is one 
thing sure : the carpenter who does not 
believe in Unions, and who keeps out 
of them as long as possible, only to join 
at last, and never afterwards dares to 
express his honest opinion, or his sense 
of justice, is no more an absolute slave 
than is the woman who surrenders her 
own action, in whatever direction, to the 
dictates of society. Both she and the 
carpenter are under a slavery as abso- 
lute as if they were living in Russia or 
Turkey, and they will not come out until 
they have paid the uttermost farthing. 



FREEDOM 



93 



Many women seem to be under the 
impression that nothing can be accom- 
plished in the direction of freedom un- 
less a Society be formed with president, 
vice-president, secretary, treasurer, and 
a large board of directors, and public 
meetings held. But independence does 
not lie that way. There are many things 
that perhaps you would like to do or 
like to have ; first bear in mind the un- 
doubted truth that there are perhaps 
only one or two things in the world 
which are not far more charming in de- 
sire than they are in possession. Mon- 
taigne relates how ardently from his 
earliest youth he had desired to have 
the order of St. Michael conferred upon 
him. But when he had in his hand the 
coveted decoration, it had ceased to at- 
tract him, partly because through his 
growth he no longer held it in so high 
esteem, partly also, probably, because it 
was his. The great actor who at last 



94 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST 

realized the dream of his life in owning 
a theatre is said to have had no pleas- 
ure in it when he had built it and could 
fill it night after night with a delighted 
public. For pleasure lies in pursuit, 
not in the attainment. It is because 
of this, that society is never satisfied, 
and, however wearied, is always on the 
race-track, straining every nerve to reach 
the goal. 

But where we cannot acquire all 
things, we must have some measure of 
values in order to select. That meas- 
ure will be the one great aim of our 
lives, whatever it may be. If we have 
no aim, then of course we have no 
measure ; and in that case it does not 
matter to ourselves or to any one else 
that we have none, so we may be left 
, out of the account. The Rev. Edward 
/ E. Hale, in one of his fictitious -real 
stories, describes the experiment of 
shooting a train of cars across the abyss 



FREEDOM 95 

round which the Horseshoe Bend runs 
on the Pennsylvania Railroad, in order 
to save time, and he details with Swift- 
iike minuteness the abstruse mathemat- 
ical calculations as to rate of speed and 
precise point of projection. He then 
goes on to describe the actual trying of 
the experiment and its gratifying suc- 
cess. The train, he tells us, landed 
safely on the other side at the very 
point calculated, with the exception of 
the drawing-room car, which, being last 
and becoming detached, had fallen into 
the gulf. But he says this in no wise 
detracted from the complete success, 
because passengers who travel in draw- 
ing-room cars would never be missed 
by any one, and that therefore they 
and their fate may with propriety be 
dropped altogether from the results, 
like infinitesimal quantities in a mathe- 
matical calculation. The humor is de- 
licious, and may serve to hint at a truth. 



c 



g6 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST 

At least those who have no particular 
aim in life really are of no account ; their 
various actions are as likely as not to 
cancel each other, and whatsoever hap- 
pens to them can never furnish material 
for a tragedy. But a fixed aim furnishes 
us with a fixed measure, by which we 
can decide whether such or such an 
action proposed is worth trying for or 
not, and as aims must vary with the in- 
dividual, the decisions of any two peo- 
ple as to the desirableness of an action 
may not be the same. But a certain 
proud independence you must possess 
if you would have peace of mind. 

Commenting on the suicide of a prom- 
inent banker, the Boston Transcript 
says : " Let us get rich as fast as we 
can. Let us speculate. Let us make 
fortunes and lose them, maybe ; no 
matter about that — but make them, any- 
way. Let us cut ourselves off from the 
sweet and wholesome influences of life, 



FREEDOM 97 

and give ourselves up to fever and mad- 
ness. Never mind about the conse- 
quences to our own peace of mind of 
such a course. Our own peace of mind 
is never worth considering. Can you 
put up peace of mind with a bank as 
collateral for a loan ? Will the Street 
reckon your peace of mind among your 
assets ? W T hy, no ; and what the Street 
does not value, is worthless, of course. 
And yet many a man dies for want of 
this very thing." The words are too 
sadly true. Yet peace of mind is an 
undoubted security at a high rate of 
interest. It is unavailable as collateral 
only because it is non-negotiable — no- 
body can transfer title to peace of mind; 
but its value is not thereby affected, 
since nobody ever desires to pledge or 
exchange it for anything. It is your 
business to find the bank that deals 
in it. 

Advice has been defined to be " that 



98 the technique of rest 

which everybody wants, everybody asks 
for, everybody gives, and nobody takes." 
But certainly there is a lack of truth in 
the last assertion. The rider buys a 
horse which is perfect in every way 
and suits him exactly. But a friend 
suggests that it is not quite up to his 
weight, another remarks that it is a lit- 
tle nervous, and a third finds some fault 
with the shape of a spot on the nigh 
fore-leg. All these criticisms work si- 
lently in his mind after the way of un- 
conscious cerebration, and three weeks 
after we meet him riding another ani- 
mal. He has simply taken advice ; 
that is all. How many of 'the books 
that you have read during the last year 
have you read simply and only because 
some one said, "You really ought to 
read it I" How many changes in your 
dress have you made on account of the 
half-meant criticism of a friend. How 
much trouble might you not have saved 



FREEDOM 99 

if, instead of consulting with another as 
to some annoyance, you had only sat 
down in your own room — if your closet 
seemed to you too small — applied to 
the difficulty the measure of your life, 
and quietly decided your course of ac- 
tion for yourself. The truth is that too 
much, not too little, is taken of the un- 
thinking advice tossed at us every day, 
often forgotten by the giver. We need 
to preach the gospel of independence 
in America, not that of dependence. 
We are always going, as we think, 
with the majority. But we forget that ft) 
the greater majority is an invisible one, 
and that it may be safer to side with 
that. It is not alone individuals that 
take too much advice. Our Legislat- 
ures and even Congress — it may be a 
result of the peculiar manner of electing 
their members — often yield, as in utter 
helplessness, on the most important is- 
sues, to advice, no matter whence com- 



IOO THE TECHNIQUE OF REST 

ing. A society of women, well-meaning, 
but with thought totally possessed by 
one evil, that of drunkenness, asks per- 
mission to offer advice to the Legislat- 
ure. The legislators thereupon frame 
a law, requiring all text-books in physi- 
ology which are to be used in the public- 
schools to be profusely illustrated with 
violent wood-cuts, depicting the liver or 
the stomach of an habitual drinker, and 
a chapter to be attached to every divis- 
ion of the book, pointing out the effect 
of alcohol on the different tissues of 
the body. They think to produce in 
the child's mind a terror of the distantly 
possible which will enable the man to 
turn away from the saloon. If they 
were teachers, they would place a more 
just estimate on the residuum left in 
the minds of children from such talk in 
school. Or Congress obediently follows 
the advice of the manufacturers of 
some article and lays a high duty upon 



FREEDOM IOI 

it, only to wake to the knowledge, a few 
months later, that in protecting that 
infant industry they have throttled in 
a distant territory half a dozen others, 
of whose indirect connection with the 
first, they had never had even the shade 
of the shadow of an idea. Mr. Powder- 
ly would not probably materially im- 
prove the Constitution were it to be 
subjected to his revision, as was seri- 
ously proposed only a few years ago. 
Everybody takes advice, because it 
seems to be a way of getting, at least 
temporarily, out of a difficulty, and, at 
any rate, of shifting the responsibility 
for failure if it come. But the fact is 
that there is only one person who can 
decide a problem, because he is the 
only one knowing all the conditions, 
external and internal, and that is the 
person whose problem it is. You have 
to grapple with it first or last, and it is 
as easy to do it first. \ Free yourself at 



102 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST 

once from the slavery of always doing 
this or that just because some friend 
says to you, "You really ought to do 
it!" and you will take the first step 
towards an independence which will 
rest you, if it be only on account of its 
novelty. In a recent article in the Fort- 
nightly Review, entitled "Under the 
Yoke of the Butterflies/' Mr. Auberon 
Herbert says: "The world persistently 
presents us with the paradox that a 
very large percentage of its people live 
habitually doing what they don't want 
to do : giving subscriptions they don't 
want to give ; visiting and receiving 
people they don't want to visit and re- 
ceive ; saying things they don't mean 
and don't want to say; spending time 
and money which they don't want to 
spend ; supporting measures and pro- 
ceedings they don't want to support ; 
putting into this or that kind of office 
people whom they would rather not see 



FREEDOM 103 

there ; in fact, generally contradicting 
themselves, because they have attached 
themselves to some system or other 
which they find it is, on the whole, 
easier to obey than to disobey." 

In the matter of dress it seems as if 
the majority of women have no inde- 
pendence at all. If, as has been said, 
every woman creates in her own likeness 
the gifts which are given her, it is surely 
true that every woman should in a meas- 
ure create after her own nature the dress 
which she habitually wears. To see 
two grown women dressed exactly alike 
is, with almost every one, to pass the 
mental judgment that at least one of 
them must have very little character of 
her own. In a somewhat restricted 
sense we pass the same judgment when 
each season, we see almost every wom- 
an in a city following some one decree 
of fashion, no matter how unreasonable, 
inconvenient, or unbecoming. Fash- 



104 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST 

ion says, " Fasten your arms down to 
your hips so that you will look like a 
trussed turkey," and they do it. " Have 
your sleeves set up so that it will be im- 
possible to lift your hands to your 
heads, so that you will have to put on 
your hat before you put on your dress," 
and the obedient slaves answer, " Aye." 
" Sweep the streets with your skirts," 
and they are swept. " Wear them so 
tightly drawn that the outline of your 
form is distinctly seen by every one 
who may meet you," and a life school 
for the sculptor is at once set up in ev- 
ery street-car. These illustrations are 
perhaps enough, though the list might 
be almost indefinitely enlarged. It is 
by no means to be maintained that fash- 
ion has not a certain right to authority. 
As Walter Pater acutely says, "The 
power of fashion is but one minor form, 
slight though it may be, yet distinctly 
symptomatic of that deeper yearning 



FREEDOM 105 

of human nature towards an ideal per- 
fection which is a continuous force in 
it." To ignore fashion entirely, or to 
fight against it continually, is not to se- 
cure freedom. It is said that one of 
the sweetest and strongest of Boston 
women, now dead, but while here al- 
ways anxious to serve others, made her* 
self more trouble and care by insisting 
upon the really uncouth dress which 
she habitually wore than if she had con- 
formed to the prevailing style, simply 
because her attire was so out of date 
that it was hard and almost impossible 
to have it made after her plans. It is 
not necessary to go to such extremes 
as this. It is perfectly easy for any 
woman so to dress that, while she is not 
noticeable on the street, she shall be 
entirely comfortable, and able to do 
what she has to do without fatigue 
from carrying undue weight, and with- 
out having any motion consciously ham- 



106 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST 

pered. I heard one woman say to an- 
other some years ago : :i Oh, do get a 
Jersey waist. You have no idea how 
comfortable they are ! Why, I can lift 
both arms up straight over my head." 
And she did so, stretching up her shape- 
ly arms with a sigh of relief and a smile 
of triumph, only to hear the answer, 
"Why, I have not a dress in the world 
that I cannot do that in. And the 
speaker, too, lifted her arms, straight as 
an arrow high above her head, while 
all the weight of her skirts was lifted 
smoothly and easily, as the shoulders 
rose. And yet you would not have re- 
marked the dress of the second woman 
if you had met her, as at all peculiar. 
It is not necessary, in order to reform 
your dress, if it need reforming, to be- 
long to any association or any league 
for the purpose. As the most natural 
and effective way after the war to re- 
sume specie payments was just simply 



FREEDOM 107 

to resume, so the most sensible way to 
reform your dress is to reform it. Any 
woman whose dress is worth consider- 
ing at all, surely has enough common- 
sense and invention to order her own 
under-clothing so that it shall be health- 
ful and perfectly comfortable. If she 
have not, she had better not try to re- 
form the world in any larger way. There 
is one thing sure : if you will not trou- 
ble yourself much about the passing 
fashion, taking care only not to dress 
so that you will attract attention from 
excessive singularity, but keeping all 
the parts of your clothing simple and 
comfortable, you will be sure to see the 
fashion come round to you once in 
about seven years, and find yourself, to 
your great amusement, wearing clothes 
in the mode. The original Free Sort- 
ers were a small party at first but it 
took only time for all the Whigs to fall 
into line after them. 



108 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST 

At any rate, if you are to do your 
work without getting tired, you have got 
to save all unnecessary weight in what 
you have to carry, and what weight can- 
not be avoided should be hung where 
it will do the least harm. The amount 
of strength which can be saved by con- 
forming to the simplest rules of com- 
mon-sense in the matter of dress is 
very great, as those of us who have 
tried it know. Of course the object of 
the dress -maker and the tailor is to 
avoid wrinkles, and they are right, so 
far as their profession goes ; but I fancy 
you would hardly care to assert that 
your object in life was the same. It is 
only the old story ; first make up your 
mind what you want to do with your 
life, and then decide the question of 
dress, as every other question, by that 
test. It is not so hard as you suppose 
to be independent about these things. 
Those who are single-hearted in any 



FREEDOM log 

great aim never find it so. In fact, 
they don't think about it at all. They 
go on and do what they have to do, 
saving every smallest bit of strength as 
they go, and that is all there is about it. 
The same necessity of independence 
exists as to what you shall read. Most 
people read every year what happens 
to come in their way, or what some per- 
son happens to say that they ought to 
read. Just look back over your read- 
ing for the last year and say if this has 
not been so with you. If you read sto- 
ries for rest and relaxation, take only 
those that are by authors of some real 
repute. Eschew the crowd of novels 
that every week brings forth, only to 
be relegated in a few weeks to de- 
served oblivion. Better wait a while, 
and see whether a book has any but an 
ephemeral life before you spend your 
time on it ; it is not necessary that you 
should read a story at the same time 



HO THE TECHNIQUE OF REST 

with everybody else. Do not destroy 
all the fibre of your mind and lower 
your whole mental tone by reading 
wishy-washy stuff, even though it be not 
bad. And even with the magazines, 
which give you a series of disconnected 
articles, inviting you monthly or weekly 
to an exhibition of noses, arms, hands, 
and chippings from many studios, but 
not one really whole work of art, have 
some line in your reading. As it does 
not become your duty to visit a woman 
simply because she invites you to do 
so, so it is by no means your duty to 
read an article merely because the edi- 
tor of a certain magazine serves it up 
to you. You do not feel obliged to eat 
of every dish on the bill of fare at a 
hotel, or to buy all the jewelry in a 
store because you go into it. The edi- 
tor makes up his magazine to suit all 
tastes " if by any means he may please 
some." If he be worthy of his title, 



FREEDOM III 

whether he be magazine or newspaper 
editor, he tries to place himself behind 
the public and to see through their eyes. 
He endeavors to make each number of 
his production a whole in itself, minis- 
tering to each of his world of readers in 
some way. In this effort at wholeness 
in each number lies the pleasure of his 
labor, and in the success of this effort 
consists his right to his title. But that 
is no reason why you should read all 
he offers. Read no article in a maga- 
zine which does not bear on your own 
subjects of thought and does not fall 
into line with your other reading, and you 
will be doing wisely. The trouble with 
magazines is the same as with concerts : 
they consist of only fragments. If one 
of these is such as you need to fill in a 
gap in your thought, then you want it. 
Pick it out and fit it into your mosaic. 
But if you are desirous of understand- 
ing Wagner in the degree possible to 



112 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST 

you, it would seem hardly worth while 
to listen to a dozen " Prize Waltzes " be- 
fore the music of Tannhauser is played. 
At the concert you may be obliged to 
hear many such waltzes in order to 
reach your aim, but with the magazine 
the same trouble does not exist. Have 
always some reason for reading a mag- 
azine article or let it alone. The same 
rule should apply to the daily news- 
paper. History in the making is a very 
uncertain thing. It might be better to 
wait till the South American republic 
has got through with its twenty -fifth 
revolution before reading much about it. 
When it is over, some one whose busi- 
ness it is, will be sure to give you in a 
digested form all that it concerns you 
to know, and save you trouble, confu- 
sion, and time. If you will follow this 
plan, you will be surprised to find how 
new and fresh your interest in what you 
read will become. The difference be- 



FREEDOM 113 

tween reading to find out something 
you really want to know, and reading 
whatever happens to fall into your hands 
is very great. It is like the difference 
between eating because you are hungry, 
and eating because you are summoned 
to the table. 

And one word more on the subject 
of reading : If you read only the best, 
you will have no need of reading the 
other books, because the latter are 
nothing but a rehash of the best and 
the oldest. To read Shakespeare, Pla- 
to, Dante, Milton, Spenser, Chaucer, 
and their compeers in prose, is to read 
in condensed form what all others have 
diluted. If you have little time for eat- 
ing, you will find it desirable to take 
only the most nutritious food — that is, 
only the most condensed. Do the same 
thing as to books, and you will be sur- 
prised to find how much time you will 
have for reading. 



V 



114 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST 

Then how much strength and time 
do you waste every day in worrying 
about possible happenings, half of which 
never come to pass ? With a little rea- 
soning and a little determined effort of 
will, there is a chance for great economy 
in this line. When your friend is ill, you 
suffer a hundred deaths for one which 
perhaps will not come, because you give 
rein to your excited imagination, and 
arrange in your mind for all sorts of 
future contingencies. If instead of do- 
ing this you will give your whole atten- 
tion to the actual present, doing faith- 
fully all that can be done, and then just 
leave something to God, you will save 
so much wear and tear. Many people 
are not willing to leave anything entire- 
ly in His hands, and practically treat 
Him as if He were far from as com- 
petent as themselves. It is precisely 
"in all time of our tribulation " that we 
should trust the most. One is often 



FREEDOM 115 

reminded of the little boy who was quite 
willing to say his prayers at night, but 
absolutely refused to say them in the 
morning, maintaining that "any fellow 
could take care of himself in the day- 
time.'' And yet those who will not 
practise trusting in the sunshine are 
sure to find difficulty in the darkness. 
We cannot expect to reap where we 
have not sown, though we often for 
that reason 

" all alone beweep our outcast state, 
And trouble deaf Heaven with our bootless 
cries." 

There was much wisdom in the story in 
the old reading-books of the farmer's 
clock, which stopped one night because 
the pendulum had been calculating how 
many times it would have to beat in a 
century, and felt itself entirely discour- 
aged at what was to be required of it. 
But the centuries are not dealt out to 
us in wholes. We persist in winding up 



Il6 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST 

our eight-day clocks every evening, and 

then wonder that we are so tired. We 

laugh at Don Quixote as he tilts with 

windmills, and then close the book to do 

the same thing. It is not impossible to 

control imagination. It may be hard; 

but fighting, even if it bring temporary 

defeat, is better than not fighting, and 

what seems defeat is often victory, even 

if we do not count the increased strength 

which comes from effort of the will. 

The farmers had to retreat from Bunker 

Hill, but they won a victory all the same. 

It was for us that those ten thousand 

kinsmen of ours stood against the hosts 

of the Persians at Marathon, and won 

the fight because of the invisible forces 

within them. They are fighting for us 

still, and we with them, if we fight at all. 

And then 

The sun will shine and the clouds will lift; 
The snow will melt, though high it drift; 
Across the ocean there is a shore; 
Must we learn the lesson o'er and o'er? 



FREEDOM 117 

To know there is sun when the clouds droop 

low, 
To believe in the violets under the snow, 
To watch on the bows for the land that shall 

rise — 
That is victory in disguise. 

There can be no work, whatever it 
may be, that is so exhausting as pain- 
ful emotion ; while on the other hand, 
mercifully, there is no tonic so upbuild- 
ing and renewing as joy, which sets into 
active exercise every constructive pow- 
er of the body, and whose rush is like 
the leap of the brooks in spring from 
the strong mountain -tops to the low- 
lands. There is nothing more sure to 
undermine health than constant gnaw- 
ing dissatisfaction with one's lot. And 
that is in your own power to destroy, 
though you may not be able to alter 
the circumstances. Emily Dickinson 
said a wise thing when she wrote, "Do 
not try to be saved, but let redemption 
find you, as it certainly will." She might 
have added, as she surely meant, if you 



118 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST 

keep in the roads by which it travels. 
In most cases of nervous exhaustion it 
is the diseased mind which requires 
treatment, or has required treatment 
long before. "Useless muscular ten- 
sion is merely a reflex of cerebral con- 
ditions." The body is only the tool of 
the mind, and its restlessness betrays 
the condition of that mind. Do not 
waste much time by treating symptoms ; 
if you want to be cured, go straight to 
the cause of the disease. Medical sci- 
ence will tell you that more and more 
it relies for a cure on the great healing 
forces of Nature. If the physician can 
succeed in giving strength to the tone 
of the whole body, he knows that he may 
leave the disease to take care of itself. 
Only a temporary peace is gained by a 
treaty which does not touch the under- 
lying principles that caused the war. 
And there will always be restlessness 
and fatigue till peace is born of inner 
freedom. 



RESTLESSNESS 



119 



IV 



RESTLESSNESS 




(HE migration of whole races 
from their original homes, 
in the history of the world 
generally westward to new 
locations, has been a phe- 
nomenon always especially interesting 
to the student oj: history, considering 
not only the great changes which it 
has involved in the lives of the nations 
upon which they have poured down, 
but also the causes that have induced 
the movement. It seems as if a whole 
people becomes possessed by a kind 
of fury for a change. They leave all 
that is familiar to them and go in a 
mass to strange places, driving out be- 
fore them the inhabitants of those lands 



120 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST 

and taking the country for their own. 
Why they should do so at that time 
more than at any other is to us inscruta- 
ble, except that, in the Scripture phrase, 
"the fulness of time" is come for them. 
History is full of such stories, from the 
great irruption of the Mongol Tartars 
into China to the risings and departures 
of the peoples in the north of Europe, 
whose far-off rush southward made it- 
self at last very distinctly felt in the 
fall of the Roman Empire, and that also 
when the "fulness of time" was come. 
When Christianity turned the main 
forces of the world inward, it did not 
leave untouched this impulse for move- 
ment. The area to be sought and taken 
possession of was, in a measure, trans- 
ferred to the spirit, and the restlessness 
which had long before driven those old 
tribes to wide wandering now appears in 
the mind instead of on the surface of 
the earth. The wandering goes on still, 



RESTLESSNESS 121 

and in mighty hordes of men, over wide 
and unknown spaces. The old land- 
marks are forsaken, and a strong im- 
pulse, not confined to any one country 
or continent, calls thought forth to new 
and untried conquests. The old im- 
pulse is not dead ; only its field has 
been changed. The migration is now 
into the fields of natural science, now 
into those of divine truth, and it presses 
always further. Old standards are cast 
aside, old conceptions put to the test ; 
the demand is for change, always change, 
and for new resting-places for thought 
and belief. The human spirit is always 
asking after a place where it may stop 
and build abodes. But so long as it is 
human — which is the same thing as di- 
vine — it must be driven, in spite of its 
own will, by the impulse to move on to 
new homes. The fever of migration is 
contained within its very nature, and it 
can hope to escape it only for a time. 



122 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST 

To us, who live so close to the twen- 
tieth century, the on-rushing movement 
which sweeps the world away seems to 
have been accelerated with frightful ve- 
locity within the present generation. It 
seems as if our parents, or at least our 
grandparents, dwelt quietly among their 
own folk, and were allowed quietly to die 
in the old beliefs which they had learned 
at the knees of their mothers. But for 
us there is no such repose of soul. 

" ' For you,' they said, ' no barriers be, 
For you no sluggard rest. 
Each street leads downward to the sea, 
Or landward to the West.' " 

It is possible that we mistake, and that 
what at this distance appears to us a 
halcyon rest was to them a time of heart- 
searching; to them also it may have 
seemed as if all moorings were loosen- 
ing, and they drifting with their gen- 
eration to unknown seas. But, how- 
ever this may be, we know that for us 



RESTLESSNESS 123 

the world of invention and discovery 
has moved faster than our power to 
adapt ourselves to it has increased, and 
we, desirous as we are at tired mo- 
ments of something that we can rest in, 
are forced to consider problems which 
in our ignorance we had fancied long 
ago settled, so differently do they pre- 
sent themselves to modern thought. 
Always there is something new, and 
life heaves with a perpetual restless- 
ness, from the influence of which no 
one can hold himself entirely free. 

It seems to some of us as if what 
was known as the old home-life were 
fast disappearing; young people no 
longer seek their pleasures in the home, 
but outside of it, and the pleasures are 
no longer quiet. This is not their fault. 
We may consider it their misfortune ; 
but, after all, it is a fact that has to be 
faced and cannot be overlooked. It is 
an unmistakable truth that the family 



124 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST 

tie is not so strong as it was a hundred 
years ago, and that the individuality of 
the members of a household has to be 
taken more into account than was for- 
merly the case. Some of the far-reach- 
ing effects of the tendency we may de- 
plore, but we cannot avoid ; we have 
to take the world as we find it, and do 
the best with it as it is. It is true that 
this doctrine, carried to the uttermost, 
would have kept Columbus on the oth- 
er side of the Atlantic, and left elec- 
tricity to dash about uncontrolled in 
the atmosphere instead of obeying our 
command. In some places we might 
feel it a duty to inculcate the need of 
change and of faster progress, but the 
modern American city is certainly not 
one of these, and there would seem lit- 
tle danger within its walls of laying too 
much emphasis on the beauty of re- 
pose. And, at any rate, even a clergy- 
man cannot be expected to preach both 



RESTLESSNESS 125 

faith and works on the same Sunday; 
if his text be faith, he must teach faith 
to the best of his ability, leaving for 
that Sunday at least, the great value of 
works out of consideration. In like 
manner here and now our text is not 
motion but Rest. 

Whatever other people in other times 
have needed, we in America are not 
likely to suffer from stagnation, and a 
lack of effort to do a hundred things 
at a time ; what we need are lessons in 
rest and repose, and not more of the 
restlessness which already runs riot in 
every drop of our blood. We cannot 
keep still, though we long to do so, and 
though increasing weariness warns us 
that we are going on towards a break- 
down. The restlessness of the sea is 
as nothing compared with the restless- 
ness of the American people. At any 
rate, in the sea every drop is trying 
to get below every other, and thus to 



126 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST 

come nearer to one fixed and stable 
point ; but here every drop in the so- 
cial ocean is, on the other hand, en- 
deavoring to get above every other in 
some particular, and there is no fixed 
point at all. 

The restless drive of the impulse is 
creating a new variety of men and 
women, to be recognized wherever met 
— and where, over all the surface of 
the earth, are they not sure to be met ? 
The mental unrest is passing into the 
physique. How many women do you 
know who can sit perfectly still or stand 
perfectly motionless ? With how many 
do you talk who will allow you to finish 
a sentence without interrupting? How 
many have the grace of only walking 
quietly, or of speaking slowly and placid- 
ly so that it is a delight to listen ? How 
many whose eyes are not constantly rov- 
ing? How many who are not always in a 
hurry, and complaining that everything 



RESTLESSNESS 127 

always comes at the same time with ev- 
erything else ? To how many houses — 
so-called homes — can you go as into a 
haven of rest, where everything breathes 
quietness and repose ? How manjf men 
can even cross the ferry from New York 
to Brooklyn without reading vigorously 
every one of the few minutes of the 
transit, and then crowding to jump off 
the boat before she is made fast, with 
one eye still on the open newspaper ? 
How many can quietly let one street- 
car go past without running to catch 
it, though there are six others behind 
within a quarter of a mile ? How many 
can wait for a train without reading a 
few lines in every one of the newspapers 
laid out on the news-stand or careful- 
ly examining all the colored cartoons 
tacked up on the wall ? 

When you have answered these ques- 
tions you will begin to appreciate what 
a continual hurry most people live in, 



128 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST 

and perhaps you may begin to notice 
how many unnecessary and perfectly ob- 
jectless motions you yourself are help- 
ing to wear yourself out with. There 
used to be a simple game played with 
children, in the old times, which it might 
be worth while to revive : After our 
elders had answered what seemed to 
them a sufficient number of ridiculous 
questions and were tired of our childish 
fun, they used to set us in a line and 
propose that we and they should fold 
our arms, shut our eyes, and see how 
long we could keep still, and the one who 
could keep perfectly still the longest 
was to be called "the best fellow." 
Perhaps it may have been so, for "com- 
posure is often the highest result of 
power." If only we were restive instead 
of restless, it would be well for us. 

It is undoubtedly true that our cli- 
mate has much to do with the state of 
the case. It is impossible for English- 



RESTLESSNESS 129 

men to believe many facts which have 
always been familiar to us ; as, for in- 
stance, that one can light the gas on a 
cold winter day by touching the burner 
with a knuckle, or that sparks may fly 
from the hair when brushed under the 
same circumstances. The editor of the 
London Journal of Education professed 
entire incredulity as to these things 
when they were told to him a few years 
ago. To live in such an electrical cli- 
mate is to be a very different person 
from those who do not. It is doubtless 
true that we do live in a " nervous ten- 
sion produced by climate and habit of 
hurried life — a tension visible in the as- 
tonishing frequency of sudden deaths 
from overwork and emotion, and an in- 
tense fear of opinion, which, so to speak, 
causes self-love, the sense of personal 
dignity, to remain permanently raw." 
So comments the Spectator, reviewing an 
article entitled " The Brand of Cain," 



I 3 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST 

in the Fortnightly, charging the people 
of the United States with readiness to 
commit and to condone murder. I am 
inclined to think that the " habit of 
hurried life " and the sensitiveness to 
opinion spoken of as morbid states are 
not co-ordinate causes with, but results 
of, the climate, the effect of which goes 
very deep in all the life of this people. 
But, as I have said, we have to take the 
world as we find it, and our climate is 
one of the factors which must not be 
left out of the problem we have to solve 
for ourselves and for our children. 

Much of the Restlessness we see and 
feel comes from over- exertion. It is 
as if the machine had got to working 
at such a strain that even if we wished 
we could not stop it. We seem to have 
become slaves to the blind force of 
inertia, and our will is no longer of any 
avail. There is no bichloride of gold 
treatment for this state, nor is any 



RESTLESSNESS 131 

necessary, for as it is a result not of 
deficiency of will, but of its abound- 
ing strength — a strength born of con- 
stant exercise — we have in our own 
hands the means for our cure. We have 
strength of will sufficient to force our- 
selves not to be outwardly restless when 
we are awake, if only we will use it. It 
is the people of most will who are in 
most danger of wearing out, because 
they have all their lives forced up the 
unwilling and protesting bodily powers 
to tasks which were too great for them, 
as the horse is forced up to the leap 
which his reason tells him is danger- 
ously high, by the whip and spur of his 
rider. When we are awake, I said — and, 
unhappily, if we have habitually over- 
worked our nervous force, we are awake 
too often when we know that we ought 
to be asleep. We hear the clock strike, 
and, calculate the number of hours left 
to us before the time at which the work 



132 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST 

of another day must begin, with a sort 
of despair, and with an anathema on 
the city congregation so heathenishly 
thoughtless of the comfort of people 
forced to live within sound of their 
much -loved clock that they allow the 
perfectly useless time-announcer to dis- 
turb and trouble them. They them- 
selves live far away from the steeple, so 
that they are not disturbed. Only six 
hours left, and then presently only five 
and then only four ! If that clock would 
only stop reiterating its dreadful tale of 
truth ! You remember the Sibylline 
leaves and all the stories of Edgar Poe 
that you have ever read, and try to 
think of something else, or to be chari- 
table to the worshippers who own the 
clock, but it is all of no use, and the 
next day draws pitilessly nearer and 
nearer. You can almost hear the sure, 
smooth turning of the earth around its 
axis, and you wish that Edison would 



RESTLESSNESS 133 

turn his attention to the problem of 
adding to the force of friction in that 
region. And then you remember that 
the axis is imaginary only, and that 
even Edison would be of no use, and 
the Christian clock strikes again ! 

The fact is only that the vapor will not 
go back into the casket, the flying horse 
on which you have insisted on making 
your journeys will not descend because 
the wooden peg in his neck has become 
fast, the mill which was so useful to 
grind your corn will not stop grinding 
even in the night-season. These things 
are your masters now, not your slaves, 
and the demon of sleeplessness, more 
horrible and more fatal than the Old Man 
of the Sea, is upon you, insisting upon 
your working without, nay, against your 
will, just as the screw of a vessel whirls 
round as the wave lifts it out of the 
water, and shakes her from stem to stern, 
uselessly and harmfully, as if driven 



134 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST 

by some demonic power. The demonic 
power in you, however, is not demonic, 
but only a heavenly power perverted, 
just as all the faults of a child are only 
unregulated virtues. It is nothing but 
your own will which has become so 
strong that you are afraid of it. Do not 
complain, then, nor hesitate to use your 
will to keep yourself perfectly quiet at 
any rate. You can if you only think you 
can. Be greatly thankful that you have 
the will, and if the clock be heard again, 
eat something, which by this time you 
should have learned to have always 
within reach, it matters not much what. 
The physiological trouble is that you 
have too much blood in your brain, and 
if you can divert a little of this to the 
stomach to do work there, you may suc- 
ceed in sleep suddenly. If you are ac- 
customed to lie awake for hours, you 
had better make a practice of eating 
before going to bed, preferably some- 



RESTLESSNESS 135 

thing warm. While you are waiting for 
sleep to come to you, you will certainly 
be thinking, probably of the very things 
which you are most tired of consider- 
ing ; here too, you must use your will to 
determine the course of your thought, 
and if it persistently goes back to the 
avoided topic, you must just as persist- 
ently call it away and set it on another 
track. What that track shall be matters 
not much, but it must be of your own 
choosing. As it is by the will that you 
have sinned, so it is only by the road of 
the will that you can obtain remission 
of the penalties you have brought upon 
yourself. 

To repeat poetry which you know 
perfectly, or to count, is not sufficient. 
It must be something which involves 
some effort of the memory, a list of 
incidents which you recall with a little 
difficulty, either in your own life or in 
the life of some one else, which have a 



136 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST 

certain order in regard to time or an 
arbitrary succession which you have 
given to them ; there must always be 
some call upon the memory in order to 
produce the best result. If you make 
a mistake in the order of your events, 
start at the beginning and go through 
them again, and if you do this over 
and over, you will soon find that you 
begin to do it sleepily, and then the 
battle is won. Or start at one corner 
of a room with which you are perfectly 
familiar, and travel round it, recalling 
as you go every piece of furniture in 
its place, with all the small articles which 
may lie on it, or beneath it, and if you 
make a mistake, go back to the same 
corner, and do not be satisfied till you 
have gone quite round the room. This 
is a very good plan. Or if you know 
the position of the letters on the Ham- 
mond type - writer, imagine that you 
have a Remington instead, and try to 



RESTLESSNESS 137 

write on that and spell your words. 
This device will present a most decided 
blank before your mental sight, and 
that is exactly what you want. It is 
precisely because your mind is not 
blank that you can't go to sleep. It is 
said that Kant used to tell his students 
to " think the wall," and then when they 
had succeeded in doing that, to "think 
their thought of the wall." That is also 
a very good exercise sleepward. The 
plans which I have suggested above may 
seem to conflict with the directions of 
the philosopher, inasmuch as they lead 
towards the concrete and his towards 
the abstract ; but that makes no differ- 
ence. They both lead towards a state 
of muddiness in the mind, and when 
thought ceases to be clear you may 
hope it will stop altogether. It may do 
to rehearse an imaginary sermon to be 
preached in Trinity church in case you 
should ever be summoned to officiate 



138 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST 

there. You can arrange the heads, and 
the more you have, the better. It would 
be well to begin as an old preacher in 
Boston is said to have been fond of 
doing, " Dear brethren, I shall divide 
my thoughts on this text into four heads, 
and each of these I shall subdivide 
into twenty-five minor divisions." That 
would be an excellent way of starting 
in. Sermons of this sort have such 
soporific power that they have actually 
been known to affect the members of 
the congregation who only listened to 
them. 

One thing you must not do, and that 
is to become deeply interested in the 
welfare of the imaginary audience, for 
if you do, you will step into the domain 
of the emotions, and there is no sleep 
there; keep in the line of pure reason 
and argument. Never allow yourself 
to plan what you are to do; don't get 
into the realm of real action unless it 



RESTLESSNESS 139 

be past action, and, again and again, be 
sure that you make demand on abstract 
memory. Then help the process by 
lying in such a way as to leave every 
muscle in a state of relaxation. In 
other words, lie as if you were dead. 
Let go of your muscles ! You will find 
it possible to withdraw your will from 
even the tips of the fingers if you make 
the effort to do so. Gradually take it 
away from every muscle, beginning with 
those of the fingers. When they lie 
perfectly limp, call in the will from the 
arm muscles, one arm at a time, and so 
on. You must give close attention to 
this withdrawal of the will, and that is 
also good, for then you will cease think- 
ing about yourself or any business. 
Put yourself as much as possible into 
the state of a man who is dead drunk. 
You know how expressionless his hands 
look? Don't put yours into any defi- 
nite position ; lift them slowly, and then 



T40 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST 

let them drop where and how they will, 
and lie as they fall. It may be added 
that the slow swinging of a hammock 
is certainly provocative of sleep. There 
seems to be a direct drowsying influence 
on the brain, produced by the rhythmi- 
cal swing which gradually grows slower, 
and finally dies out by imperceptible 
gradations; and I think that whoever 
has had a hammock slung in his room 
will have come to the conclusion that 
the instinct of the human race was right 
when it fashioned rockers for the baby's 
cradle. 

It is as much your duty to go to sleep 
as it is to eat your food. It is your 
fault that you do not, if you will not use 
every means in your power towards that 
end. As God meant that you should 
die, because only in that way could your 
life come to perfection, so he meant you 
to sleep while you lived, and to sleep 
enough to keep you fresh for work, 



RESTLESSNESS I 4 I 

which also He mercifully ordained as a 
means of health. Just as you withdraw 
from the company of friends and un- 
dress yourself, so you should take your 
mind to itself, free it from the gar- 
ments necessary to labor, and put it 
into His hands for refreshment and 
rest. But you do not do this when you 
lie down only to go over and over the 
actions of the finished day, or painfully 
to lay plans for the cares of the mor- 
row. It is especially futile to try to do 
this last ; what you will do when the day 
comes must depend very much upon 
what sort of a day it is, and what shall 
be the conditions of the real work-a-day 
world. Your action is only a part of a 
great whole of working men, women, 
and things, of which you and your reso- 
lutions are the smallest fraction. What 
you will do depends upon what they 
will do and say. This you cannot by 
any possibility know, and even if you 



142 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST 

could, you are not now in condition to 
appreciate the bearings of things upon 
each other and upon you, your power 
of judgment being in some degree im- 
paired by your isolation. As in the 
night - obscurity of your chamber you 
fancy all sorts of threatening and mon- 
strous shapes in articles of furniture or 
clothing which are very small and harm- 
less, so in the separateness of your ex- 
cited thought you are really unable to 
measure and assign their due propor- 
tions to arguments and probabilities. 
The conclusions formulated with so 
much pains in the night are seen with 
the first rays of the sun to be of no 
value in the day-world, and so gradually 
you learn to save yourself the labor of 
working them out. As plants are sup- 
posed to breathe out a different sub- 
stance in the dark from that which they 
exhale by day, so does the human mind 
by night exhale only impossible fancies. 



RESTLESSNESS 143 

Learn not to be restless in planning for 
the future ; learn to wait till you come 
to the bridge before you cross it, and 
you will be saved many footsteps. Alone 
in your room, with the uncertainty of 
the unseen universe around you, and 
with the fatigue of the day upon you, 
deprived of any visible or audible stand- 
ards of measure by which to test the 
importance of things, you are no more 
capable of drawing correct conclusions 
about what you had best do in difficult 
circumstances than is the hermit in the 
desert of making out a running sched- 
ule for the New York Central Railroad. 
Charles V. found it difficult to direct 
the affairs of his kingdom from the 
monastery of Yuste, and the effort of 
his restless brain brought him only vex- 
ation when, finding weariness in his se- 
clusion, he tried again to take part in 
the turmoil from which he had fancied 
he should be glad to escape. 



144 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST 

Of course, the more active is the 
mind, the more difficulty exists in put- 
ting it into a state of passivity ; teach- 
ers, for instance, whose calling compels 
them to be active in a high degree on 
the minds of others, find it at last al- 
most impossible to attain this state; 
they can teach, but they cannot listen. 
The incapacity is one of the losses 
which the profession entails. But, af- 
ter all, if you are to gain any great j 
amount of good from the world, you 
must attain a passive condition of mind,/ 
He who receives a great many letters 
demanding answer, sees himself as if 
engaged in a hopeless struggle of one 
man against the rest of the world. 
However, it is never to be forgotten 
that it is the rest of the world and not 
you that holds the great share of the 
world's wealth, and that you must allow 
yourself to be acted upon by the world, 
if you would become a sharer in the 



RESTLESSNESS 145 

gain of all the ages to your own infinite 
advantage. Many lose all the possible 
benefit to be won by travel because they 
have not the necessary passivity. You 
should go to picture-galleries and mu- 
seums of sculpture to be acted upon, 
and not to express or try to form your 
own perfectly futile opinion. It makes 
no difference to you or to the world 
what you may think of any work of art. 
That is not the question ; the point is 
how it affects you. The picture is the 
judge of your capacity, not you of its 
excellence ; the world has long ago 
passed its judgment upon it, and now 
it is for the work to estimate you. If 
without knowing that a certain picture 
is from the hand of a great master, you 
find yourself wonderfully affected by it 
and drawn to it over and over again, you 
may be glad that its verdict upon you 
is favorable and that you are acquitted 
from the possible charge of foolishness, 



I 4 6 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST 

but you ought to be very humble in your 
gladness. When you go to Cologne Ca- 
thedral, sit down and make your mind 
perfectly passive and empty, and wait for 
what measure of grace may be vouch- 
safed to you. In religion the influence 
which comes to the passive mind — 
made and held so by the active will — 
is called Grace, and it is that which will 
descend upon you in other domains if 
only you will let it come. The main 
trouble generally is that by your con- 
tinual Restlessness you keep your soul 
in such a state that no influence can 
come to you from without. And yet 
from without it is, that all sorts of good 
things are pressing to reach and to bless 
you. As a writer in the Christian Un- 
ion says, " No one knows so well as he 
who does great things how partial and 
limited is his work, and how divine a 
refuge from the fragmentariness of his 
life is absorption in the vastness of 



RESTLESSNESS 147 

God's work, and obliviousness in the 
vastness of God's life." But you can- 
not be absorbed unless you will let 
yourself be so. One path out of rest- 
lessness is by the road of doing great 
things, which always leads through the 
valley of humility as it goes, with the 
kingdom of Heaven at its end. 

There is a Restlessness springing 
from the consciousness of power not 
fully utilized, which must be present 
wherever there is unused power of 
whatever kind. This is the restlessness 
of the germ within the seed, struggling 
upward and downward towards its prop- 
er life. It is a valuable testimony that 
there is life within, but where the sur- 
roundings are unfavorable, it is a striv- 
ing full of pain, the cutting of tender 
flesh by the fetters of the captive as he 
struggles against their pitilessness. The 
wild birds that fall dead at the foot of 
the light-house, dashed back from the 



148 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST 

hard glass of the lantern whose light 
called them from safe flying in the soft 
air, know this. But they fall dead, and 
their rest is sudden and swift, while to 
the human pain, can be applied only 
the palliative of a long patience and 
fortitude. But the shadow merely of 
Peter healed the sick folk as he passed 
by; he did not need even to touch 
them with his hand. And so to those 
who may have the power for greater 
achievement than that for which op- 
portunity is granted them, is given the 
power to heal by their shadows as they 
pass. For the patient self-control, which 
goes on bravely in the work possible to 
it, while knowing of boundless possibil- 
ities unattainable, yields in large meas- 
ure a harvest of strength felt like the 
passing of a strong shadow wherever 
it may go. And in knowledge of this 
we may find a surcease of the Restless- 
ness with which we seem to ourselves 



RESTLESSNESS 



149 



to be devoured till there is no strength 
left. To see power wasted is very hard. 
But really no power is ever wasted in 
the spiritual kingdom any more than in 
the material. It is only transmuted 
and correlated, so that there need never 
be mourning over a loss which does not 
exist, and the Restlessness of mourning 
will thus pass over into Rest. It has 
been said of an Englishman recently 
dead : " As we looked on him and lived 
by his side, we knew well that his pe- 
culiar grace was worth more, far more, 
to the world at large than it could ever 
gauge ; more, far more, than all the 
minor average excellencies that were 
strewn thickly around us. . . . No accu- 
mulation of lower attainments in the 
many could have done for mankind 
what this one spiritual achievement ef- 
fected by its solitary supremacy. Yet 
who could look at it and doubt how 
slow had been the process by which it 



150 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST 

had been won ; how slowly and how 
patiently the tree had grown by the wa- 
ter-side before, in its due season, it had 
brought forth its fruit ; the rare grace — 
in all the senses of the word ' grace/ 
from the highest to the lowest — which 
resulted in the fine and subtile courage, 
the wise and ingrained humility, of that 
vigorous and single mind." When we 
bitterly regret our powerlessness, it may 
be that we do not trust enough to our 

UNCONSCIOUS INFLUENCE. 

Drifting dreamily with the tide, 

Slowly away from the sunset's gold, 

Leaning over our vessel's side, 

We watched the sail with its drooping fold. 

Southward, the slope of a summer hill, 
Strewn with the fragrant, new-made hay; 

The horse and hay-wagon waiting still 
For the finished fruit of the sunny day. 

The rapid rake, and the gleaming fork 
Tossing its load on the growing pile, 

Farmer and wife and children at work 
Sharing the labor, and all the while 



RESTLESSNESS 15 1 

One little maiden down on the shore, 
Just where the land and the water meet, 

Wandering free till the work was o'er, 
Chasing the waves with gleaming feet, 

Singing clearly across the bay, 
All unconscious of listening ear, 

Simple ballads, so light and gay, 

We hushed our words as we leaned to hear. 

Songs of our school-days long agone, 
Ringing out over the sunset sea; 

Then sweet in the silvery childish tone 
The battle-cry for the Land of the Free. 

Dreamily drifting by Deer Isle, 

We lay and listened with strange surprise, 
Feeling a blessing of peace the while 

Dropping down from the quiet skies; 

Feeling our deeper life touched at the core 
By the simple song of the glad child-heart; 

And peace in the boat and peace on the shore 
Were so near and yet so far apart! 

Living our lives out day by day, 
All unconscious of listening ear, 

Singing our song as we go our way, 

Do we know who may be leaning to hear ? 

Anything is restless which has not a 
purpose, and hence it is that listlessness 



152 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST 

breeds Restlessness. For listlessness 
is really " lustlessness," or pleasureless- 
ness — absence of any controlling in- 
terest in anything. To be in dead- 
earnest about one thing is to be set 
free from all sorts of slaveries, and it is 
well that the word "lust," or pleasure, 
comes from a root meaning to be set 
free, or to be released. When Mrs. 
Watts Hughes, singing through her ei- 
dophone against the disk which vibrated 
to the sound, and expecting to see the 
lycopodium dust on it take the form 
that it had taken before under the 
influence of the same tone, found the 
particles flying hither and thither, seem- 
ingly baffled in their attempts towards 
regularity, she did not understand why 
this should be so ; but she suspected 
that she had been singing with too 
much force, and upon getting rid of the 
over-tones, the obedient dust at once 
settled into the beautiful figure she was 



RESTLESSNESS 1 53 

looking for. Then she sang against it, 
pure and true, the octave of the note 
she had given before, and immediately 
the dust took another figure, the one, 
as she could now see, between which 
and the one she had been trying to 
create, it had before been uncertain, 
and hence unable to settle upon either. 
The restlessness of the lycopodium 
dust was due only to the over-tones. 
How many of us are singing with over- 
tones, and wondering why the life-dust 
is flying hither and thither, and why 
there is no rest in it? Suppose we 
were to sing only one pure tone, and 
see how quickly it would fall into order 
and symmetry. Or suppose we try an 
octave higher ! The magnetic needle is 
restless so long as it does not point to 
the north ; but when it does, there is no 
more Restlessness. 




154 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST 

V 

BLUE-ROSE MELANCHOLY 

)HERE is a country, not far 
off from many of us, where 
Professor Earle and all 
those who, like him, are 
justly anxious as to the 
fate of the Subjunctive Mood, might 
lay down all fear, for the speech there 
has no other mood, except it be the 
long discredited Potential, or the Con- 
ditional of the French and German. 
This land is full of all perfect things, 
and has no bad weather, except, now 
and then, gentle rain on the farms. 
No plans "gang agley," and to each 
dweller in it, all the other human beings 
there have no wills of their own. Rail- 
road trains never miss connection, tele- 



BLUE-ROSE MELANCHOLY 155 

grams are never misspelled or wrongly 
punctuated, and gas meters are to be 
perfectly trusted, as also the companies 
that put them in. Good people who 
fall into the water always succeed in 
reaching land in safety, while all the 
bad ones are drowned. The men who 
control the government have no other 
thought but to direct it properly, and 
the citizen may take his ease, free from 
any anxiety, even after the Legislature 
of his State has resumed its regular 
sessions. Riders and drivers always 
keep on the right side of the road, and 
all the nurses with perambulators are 
continually on the watch to see that no 
carriage or swiftly galloping horse is 
coming upon them. The inhabitants 
generally live in beautiful castles after 
the Moorish style of architecture, which 
are full of all sorts of conveniences, 
and never dusty or out of order in any 
of their appointments. Abundance of 



156 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST 

pure water rises to the top floors in 
all of them, and the kerosene used 
never smokes. If any repairs are to 
be made, the mechanics who have the 
work in charge always come in such 
succession that no one ever has to take 
out the work of another in order to put 
in his own ; but as a rule there are no 
repairs, properly so called, because all 
the material used, as also all the work- 
manship, is of the first class. The 
Irish servants have no cousins, and 
the relatives they do have are never 
dangerously ill. Children never forget 
what is told them to do, and are of 
such a nature that they perfectly and 
at once understand all the reasons 
which influence their elders in giving 
directions or issuing prohibitions ; this, 
saves any necessity for explanations, 
and prevents disobedience. All school- 
teachers, bishops, and fashionable doc- 
tors speak the exact truth, and indeed 



BLUE-ROSE MELANCHOLY 157 

have no temptation at any time to do 
otherwise. Trade is absolutely free, 
and since there is no interference with 
its regular action, takes care of itself 
in a perfectly easy way. All the inhab- 
itants, as might have been expected, 
are wealthy, and possess perfect health 
till they die, so that the physicians 
have very little to do, except to exam- 
ine, each one, the special organ of the 
body which he particularly likes, and 
to write books about it. The authors 
and publishers live always together in 
mutual admiration clubs, as do also the 
actors and the dramatic critics. 

This land is not out of sight, though 
it seems to have been somewhat diffi- 
cult of access from the earth except to 
a few who have visited it, and given to 
it each the name he thought most fit- 
ting. It is the land of the Blue Rose. 
When we speak of it, we generally begin 
our sentences with an " If," and we 



158 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST 

speak confidently in the future time. 
The sentences run somewhat after this 
model : " If this or that were so, I would 
do thus or so ;" or, " If I had not so 
much to do, I could be or do so or so." 
Or generally, " If the here and the now 
were utterly different from what they 
are, then I could be quite content; 
then I could rest, but as things are, 
it is quite impossible." The blue rose 
belongs probably to the same family 
as the blue flower told of by Novalis, 
of which Spielhagen says, " That is the 
flower which mortal eye has never yet 
seen, and the fragrance of which fills 
the whole world. Not every creature 
is delicately enough made to be able 
to perceive the perfume ; but the night- 
ingale is intoxicated with it when it 
sings and sobs and sighs in the moon- 
light or at early daybreak, and all fool- 
ish men have been and are drunk with 
it when they cry in prose or in poetry 



BLUE-ROSE MELANCHOLY 159 

to heaven, pouring out their sorrow and 
their grief. . . . He who has once breath- 
ed the perfume of the blue flower has 
no more peace and quiet in this life, 
but is driven on and on, though his 
sore feet pain him, and he yearns to 
lay down his weary head to rest. He 
asks for a drink at this or, that cottage 
door, but he returns the emptied cup 
without thanks, for there was a fly in 
the water, or the cup was not quite 
clean, or — well, he was not refreshed 
by the drink." We come across the blue 
rose again where Sir Thomas Browne 
tells us of " a maid of Germany that 
lived without meat on the smell of a 
rose," but he makes haste to warn us 
that she only pretended to be cared for 
by God and good angels, and adds that 
she was obliged to recant. There is a 
gentle melancholy which marks those 
who would be quite willing to live if 
only they could live in the country where 



160 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST 

the blue rose thrives, and which is of so 
well -pronounced a type that it is known 
by the name that I have ventured to put 
at the head of this chapter. It is met in 
all classes and ranks of society, and is 
especially to be seen in America, prob- 
ably because the facilities for travel- 
ling are here so many and so great 
that every one may hope with more or 
less degree of confidence to reach the 
land at some time, and to spend the 
rest of her life in inhaling the perfume 
of the blue rose. 

How many of us bear about the mel- 
ancholy of which I speak ! How many 
a woman is not quite sure that if she 
were in altogether different circum- 
stances, she should find no difficulty in 
doing all things required of her with 
great cheerfulness, if not with positive 
joy ! She wants to remain a fully grown 
bird, but at the same time she blames 
fate that she cannot get into the nest 



BLUE-ROSE MELANCHOLY 161 

and lie down as she once could. That 
the nest is not large enough for the old 
birds, in fact that it was never intended 
that they should get into it, strikes her 
as unreasonable. She is always com- 
plaining gently that she cannot make 
her circles squares or her squares cir- 
cles. She claims all the privileges of a 
man, and, at the same time, feels hurt 
if she fail to receive any consideration 
generally accorded to a woman. She 
is not at all desirous of a fair field and 
no favor, but she asks for all the field 
and all the favor too. She constructs 
an ideal world out of her own conscious- 
ness, and then feels injured because 
the world around her does not harmo- 
nize with it. And thus she falls a vic- 
tim to blue-rose melancholy. 

Sometimes this is' because she has 
too little real work to do ; sometimes 
because she is ignorant of what the 
world really is. She shuts herself up 



162 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST 

too much in the narrow circle of her 
own home and her own folk, and shuns, 
rather than seeks, contact with other 
scenes and other classes of people. 
When she travels she goes in first-class 
carriages, and at hotels she lives in 
suites of apartments, with those she 
knew at home ; she changes neither 
her sky nor her mind. She spends all 
her winters visiting the same persons 
and receiving visits from them, and in 
summer she does the same things and 
meets the very same people. No wonder 
that she knows so little of the real 
world, and thinks it all wrong, and 
herself a much-abused person because 
it does not go to suit her; she has a 
touch of the blue-rose melancholy, and 
other evils follow in its train. What 
she wants is the tonic of regular work 
and enough of it, and the wholesome 
nervous shock which comes from con- 
tact with people entirely different from 



BLUE-ROSE MELANCHOLY 163 

herself. Those who are tired from the 
strain of long and constant work — even 
they could tell her of the tonic effect 
of regular and much-demanding labor ; 
it may be monotonous, and it may be- 
come wearying after many years, but it 
leaves no time for illness, none for mel- 
ancholy or for dawdling on lounges, 
and none for mind -weariness, which 
saps the life and cuts the wrinkles soon- 
er than labor. It is moth and rust that 
corrupt. 

Only the flowing water is pure and 
sweet. Only the spinning top and the 
moving bicycle do not fall over. Rest 
is not found in irregular and purpose- 
less motion, nor is it stagnation; all 
real and firm rest is to be sought in 
harmonious action. It is only by con- 
stant hewing at the block of marble 
that you can find the statue hidden 
within it, and it is only by your own 
mental activity and decision that you 



164 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST 

can determine which of all the possible 
statues contained in it you will chisel 
out. What difference does it make if, in 
shaping your beautiful drinking-fount- 
ain, you cut away a hundred tons of 
granite from the stone of the quarry, 
if so be that at last you shall have a 
shapely and well-proportioned work of 
art? The best use that could be made 
of those tons of granite was to cut them 
away and reveal the fountain, and the 
work and the weariness, and all the 
long years of incompleteness, are not 
lost to the life that shapes itself into 
beauty and fulfilment at the end there- 
of. Go on and make errors, and fall 
and get up again. Only go on ! You 
will never learn to speak a foreign lan- 
guage if you are afraid of mistakes ; so 
you will never do anything with your 
own life if you are discouraged by fail- 
ure. You were made to fail over and 
over again, or you would never gain 



BLUE-ROSE MELANCHOLY 165 

any strength. The harder time you 
have, the gladder you ought to be ; for 
you are getting exercise and experi- 
ence, and, then, God would never spend 
so much trouble in training you if you 
were not worth the effort. You really 
must be of considerable value if you 
are turned, twisted, and tried in all 
sorts of ways. There was much wis- 
dom in the fable of Antaeus ; as he 
grew stronger by falling, so may you. 

Mr. George Nevile, in his Horses 
and Riding, says, " A man bought a 
horse, and after some time was asked 
by a friend whether the horse was a 
safe horse to ride, on which he replied 
that he could not tell, as the horse had 
never stumbled with him up to that 
time. This was repeated as a good joke, 
but is strict sense." It is only one out 
of a hundred wise truths which may be 
learned from experience with a horse, 
for our increase in righteousness. 



166 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST 

I saw a squirrel to-day, busy collect- 
ing dry leaves. He did not take in- 
discriminately, but selected evidently 
with much care. He held them by the 
stems in his mouth till he had so many 
that he looked as if his head were noth- 
ing but a bunch of leaves. Then he 
made for his nest, which was near the 
top of a lofty tree a long distance away; 
but he went by circuitous routes, and 
at last, when he found a group of chil- 
dren directly in his path, he took to 
the trunk of a tree at a considerable dis- 
tance from his home ; on this he climbed 
wisely and warily out to the end of a 
long branch, then leaped from that to 
the end of another on a second tree, 
and from that in the same way to his 
own, losing, as he did so, one of his 
treasures, but not for that reason fling- 
ing away the others ; then he made 
his way, still circuitously, to the nest, 
and disappeared in it. Your tasks are 



BLUE-ROSE MELANCHOLY 167 

no harder than was his, and you will 
have no greater obstacles. Have you 
not his invention and perseverance ? 
There was no blue -rose melancholy 
about him. And yet his world is a 
pretty hard one, considering the exist- 
ence of human beings in it, and it is 
full of all sorts of difficulties. 
Can you not # 

4 * Be as the bird that chancing to alight 
Upon a bough too slight, 
Feels it give way beneath her, and yet sings, 
Knowing that she hath wings?" 

Your wings must be made of the 
same stuff as that from which you have 
constructed your melancholy — your own 
imagination. But so long as you think 
of nothing but the frailness and the 
good- for -nothingness of the bough on 
which you have been standing, you will 
have no power to use it, even to spring 
from. Take to yourself wings and flee 
away. You think perhaps that the gods 



168 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST 

do not care. But if you had read 
>Jischylus you would have learned that 
" the gods, for what they care for, care 
enough." And if they do not seem to 
care for your unequalled trouble, it may 
be — I say it may be — that it is not in 
their clear eyes worth caring about. It 
is in reading such writers as ./Eschylus^ 
and not in modern literature that you 
may often find the antidote for the mel- 
ancholy which is sapping your strength. 
A taste for the best literature is a bless- 
ed gift ; if you have it not yet, strive to- 
wards it till you acquire it Be content 
to be passive and let yourself be work- 
ed upon by it, and finally you may 
begin to take in its influence actively, 
and then you will know where to go to 
find wings, and will flee as a bird to 
your mountain. 

Many people seem to overlook the 
fact that even Christ and the three dis- 
ciples did not remain forever on the 



BLUE-ROSE MELANCHOLY 169 

Mount of Transfiguration, but came 
down again into the low-lying valleys. 
Even the hardest days are a component 
part of the whole life, and should be 
looked at and held as such, not wished 
away; there is great force in the con- 
viction that everything that may be in 
your life is really a necessary part of it 
and cannot be spared, any more than 
death can, if it is to be rounded and full. 
When you meet trouble and annoyance 
in this way, they cease to be enemies 
and are changed to friends. There is 
good doctrine in " Aubrey de Vere :" 

" Count each affliction, whether light or grave, 
God's messenger sent down to thee ; do thou 
With courtesy receive him ; rise and bow ; 
And, ere his shadow pass thy threshold, crave 
Permission first his heavenly feet to lave ; 
Then lay before him all thou hast ; allow 
No cloud of passion to usurp thy brow, 
Or mar thy hospitality ; no wave 
Of mortal tumult to obliterate 
The soul's marmoreal calmness ; Grief should 
be 



170 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST 

Like joy, majestic, equable, sedate, 
Confirming, cleansing, raising, making free, 
Strong to consume small troubles ; to com- 
mend 
Great thoughts, grave thoughts, thoughts last- 
ing to the end." 

The problem before you is unchange- 
ably and always, not what you " would 
do if " — for that is the way the thought 
of blue-rose melancholy runs— but what 
you will do on this particular gloomy 
day, in this particular room, with the 
particular people and things that are in 
it. You have got to play the game with 
the cards that have been dealt to you, 
and it is of no use for you to bewail 
your fate because you don't hold dif- 
ferent ones. Look them over, arrange 
them, and play. You certainly must 
play them before you will get any oth- 
ers, and you need never expect to have 
other people's cards. You would prob- 
ably not know how to manage them if 
you had them, but that is not the point. 



BLUE-ROSE MELANCHOLY 171 

In the land of the blue-rose you would 
probably have held thirteen trumps, but 
you are not there, and what is more, 
you never will get there if you don't 
play, and play according to the full 
measure of your ability, the cards you 
do hold. 

4 ' When the armies are set in array, and the 

battle beginning, 
Is it well that the soldier whose post is far 

to the leftward 
Say, ' I will go to the right, it is there I 

shall do best service ?' 
There is a great Field- Marshal, my friend, 

who arrays our battalions ; 
Let us to Providence trust, and abide and 

work in our stations." 

Did you ever read the old proverb 
which says that it is the same to him 
whose feet are incased in a shoe as if 
the whole surface of the earth were 
covered with leather? Perhaps, after 
all, you have only to take off your own 
shoes to find that the ground is not 



172 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST 

hard and unyielding, but soft and " re- 
sulting " under your tread. At any rate ? 
the experiment is a simple one ; the 
hard surface of which you complain 
may be only one symptom that you are 
falling into blue-rose melancholy. 

Your business on this earth is the 
same as was that of the Creator at the 
first : " the singing of shapeless matter 
into symmetry and beauty." Do you 
want any higher? But notice that it 
is only the singing and not the speak- 
ing voice that sends the light lycopo- 
dium dust flying into regular forms in 
Mrs. Watts Hughes's voice-form exper- 
iments. And she warns us that " Suc- 
cess" demands considerable practice in 
singing, and untiring perseverance in its 
employment." Otherwise your chaos 
will remain chaos, and your little dust- 
heap will be only a little dust -heap at 
the end. Who hinders your practice in 
singing but yourself ? 



BLUE-ROSE MELANCHOLY 173 

Blue-rose melancholy, like other sorts 
of melancholia, is a sympton of insanity, 
that is, of a want of Reason. It must 
not be humored, it must be fought. Are 
there dragons in the road ? Attack 
them ! If there is a wall of flame across 
the path, read the' story of Spenser's 
"Britomart," and then strike spurs into 
your will and ride at it ! That is the 
only way. But — and this is a great 
" But " — make yourself sure before you 
do either, that the dragon and the flames 
are actually in your road, and not in one 
of the openings of the impenetrable 
thicket surrounding the land of the 
blue rose. If so, the way of discretion 
as well as the way of valor is to turn 
back into your actual road again, and 
not to waste strength by trying to push 
in thither. You have no right to com- 
plain of the roughness of the path if 
you have voluntarily turned aside from 
the one assigned you, to climb the wall 



174 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST 

of a precipice which seemed to lead 
more directly towards the goal of your 
wishes; if you have done so, at least 
have the grace to accept bravely and 
without murmur what you have your- 
self chosen. Don't waste time on symp- 
toms when nothing but radical meas- 
ures will do. Go straight to the root of 
the matter, to the source of the symp- 
toms. Don't be afraid to recognize that 
your real trouble is the genuine blue- 
rose melancholy, and half the battle will 
have been won. 

If you have one continuous thread 
of some strong purpose in your life, you 
can disregard things that do not touch 
it and afford to give them the go-by. 
Do not waste strength in fighting an- 
noyances which concern not that ; then, 
finally, it may be said of you, as was 
said of Canon Liddon, that " everything 
about him was natural and spontaneous, 
because it was governed by a purpose 



BLUE-ROSE MELANCHOLY 175 

so habitual that it was no longer no- 
ticed." If you have only a small nat- 
ural stock of trust, enlist under the ban- 
ner of Savonarola and be content to 
" live upon the faith of yesterday, wait- 
ing for the faith of to - morrow." At 
least you can do that, even if you have 
no faith to-day, and there are many peo- 
ple who have to live thus, so that you 
need not fear to suffer from solitude. 
There is the possibility of great virtue 
in simply standing still, as well in your 
soul as with your body, and there are 
many who learn this truth only when it 
is too late — if, indeed, there be any 
such words as " too late " in the lan- 
guage of God, or any thought which 
corresponds to them in His heart. 

Walter Pater, in Mar ins the Epicurean, 
calls attention to four characteristics of 
the Cyrenaic philosophy in which, he 
says, " it approached the nobler form of 



176 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST 

Cynicism as also the more nobly devel- 
oped phases of the old or traditional 
ethics." These are — and they may 
well give us pause — 

"The gravity of its conception of life. 

" Its pursuit after nothing less than 
a perfection. 

" Its apprehension of the value of 
time. 

"The passion and the seriousness 
which are like a consecration. " 

We live in the light which broke upon 
the world after the time of these phil- 
osophies, but we may well read and re- 
read these words, and ask ourselves 
how many of the four we have in per- 
sonal possession. They have been, per- 
haps, sufficiently illustrated in the pre- 
ceding chapters of this book, to which 
they correspond in a somewhat deeper 
sense than that of mere number. 

The demands of modern life consti- 



BLUE-ROSE MELANCHOLY 177 

tute the Sphinx of to-day. She has still 
all the strength and size of the lion, and 
she has still a woman's face. As of old, 
to the answer of the question which 
she propounds, there is no alternative 
but death, and from answering there is 
no fescape. 

Not only to the Thebans came 

The fiery question, winged with flame ; 

We hear the same, yet not the same. 

Uplifted from her dread domain, 

The Sphinx may bring us deathless pain — 

Beyond, her threatening is in vain. 

I solve no riddle, Sphinx, for thee, 
But hold thee fast and rigidly ; 
Hope thou for no escape from me. 

Not less well-won we count the field 
By waiting than by fighting sealed ; 
Thou, thou thyself shalt answer yield ! 

O Life, I hold thee face to face ; 
Nor move I back one ( single pace 
For accident of time or space ; 



178 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST 

For time and space to me belong, 

Nor know they how to work me wrong ; 

I wait, for I, not thou, am strong. 

Day after day may slow go by. 
After the worst that thou canst try, 
At last, at last, thou shalt reply ! 

No haste — Eternity is now ; 

No rest— I will not let thee go ; 

What thou hast asked, that answer thou! 



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